Contributors

Cassandra Willyard's interest in science started with camping trips with her parents and blossomed at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, where she studied conservation biology and environmental science. She attended the science writing program at the Johns Hopkins University, followed by internships with Nature Medicine and EARTH magazine in Alexandria, VA. She recently moved to New York to try her hand at freelancing. In Wild-type work, she describes her adventures with Manuel Elkin Patarroyo, a controversial malaria researcher who uses wild owl monkeys to test an experimental vaccine—and returns them to the jungle. "I think that this kind of story—the kind of story where you go somewhere that doesn't get much coverage—is really important."

Leah Fasten grew up with photography. "[I] used to dress my sister up and do these staged fashion shoots," she says. But she never seriously considered it as a possible career path until she began working as a financial advisor for an airline in Tempe, AZ. Taking advantage of the free travel, Fasten "flew all over the West," photographing her journeys. She eventually quit the airline to study photography full-time. She now lives in Boston and runs her own photography business. "I absolutely love my job," she says. "There's no other career where you get invited into people's lives for a while." In J. Christopher Love: The Nanoimmunologist, she steps in to the world of J. Christopher Love, a young nanoimmunologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is developing new techniques to study the immune system.