Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer Ouellette (born 1964) is an American science writer and editor.

Early life Ouellette was born in Ashland, Wisconsin in 1964. She attended Seattle Pacific University, where she majored in English. Her website once described her as having "stumbled into science writing quite by accident as a struggling freelance writer in New York City".

Career

From 1995 to 2004, Ouellette was a contributing editor of The Industrial Physicist, published by the American Institute of Physics; she has also served as associate editor and columnist for APS News, published by the American Physical Society. She has written for periodicals including Discover, Mental Floss, Nature, New Scientist, Physics Today, Physics World, Salon.com, Slate, Smithsonian, Symmetry, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Starting in 2006, Ouellette wrote a blog for Scientific American titled Cocktail Party Physics. She said she wanted to put a positive spin on the name, "generally a pejorative term among scientists".

Ouellette has served as journalist-in-residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and as an instructor with the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop. In 2012, she joined the American Association for the Advancement of Science's (AAAS) Committee on Science and Technology Engagement with the Public.

Ouellette was senior science editor at Gizmodo, joining the site in 2015. In 2018, she joined Ars Technica as a contributor. she is a senior writer for the site. She is a member of the Authors Guild and the National Association of Science Writers.

Awards Science writing award, Acoustical Society of America Humanist of the Year, American Humanist Association (AHA), 2018

Personal life Ouellette holds a black belt in jiu jitsu. She is married to physicist Sean M. Carroll. They live in Baltimore, Maryland.

Accepting her Humanist of the Year award at the AHA's 2018 conference, Ouellette spoke of her brother's struggle with and death from cancer, saying medical professionals should not "hide behind euphemisms and platitudes" that hinder end-of-life decision making, and about patients' need for frankness and honesty about their prognosis.

Selected publications Articles

Books