Olivia Judson

Education Judson is the daughter of science historian Horace Freeland Judson. She graduated from Stanford University in 1991 and gained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in biological sciences from the University of Oxford in 1995. Her doctoral advisor there was W. D. Hamilton.

Career Judson has published at least 10 articles and three commentaries in peer-reviewed scientific journals, including Nature, Science and The Lancet.

Beginning in 1995 Judson worked for two years as a science writer for The Economist and she later joined Imperial College London, where she is now an honorary research fellow. In 1997, she wrote an Economist article named "Sex Is War!" which was awarded the Glaxo Wellcome Prize by the British Science Writers Association. after returning to the job for a year, she then departed for a "sabbatical" from blogging beginning June 29, 2010. In 2014, after a four-year hiatus, she did a series of eight blogs about bereavement, memory, and the emptying of a family home.

In 2009, she appeared in an episode of PBS's Nova called "What Darwin Never Knew" which discussed DNA connections to evolution.

Judson has supported a possible future campaign to completely wipe out a species of mosquito which carries dengue fever.

Judson has published articles in National Geographic magazine, on Mount Erebus in 2012, on cassowaries in 2013, on bioluminescence in 2015, and on octopuses in 2016.

In an article she published in Nature Ecology and Evolution in 2017, Judson was listed as working at Freie Universität Berlin, Imperial College London and University of Glasgow.

In 2018 Judson was appointed journalist-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. It was announced that she would be researching science in St. Petersburg in the 1880s and working on a new book, 'a history of life and Earth, aimed at a general audience'. The book, titled The Co-Creation – How Earth Made Life and Life Made Earth, is scheduled to appear in October 2026.