Maryn McKenna is an independent journalist and author who specializes in public health, global health and food policy.

She is a blogger for Wired, a columnist and contributing editor for Scientific American, and writes frequently for national magazines including SELF, Health and More, and the Annals of Emergency Medicine. Her work has also appeared in The Guardian, China Newsweek, MSNBC.com, CNBC.com, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Boston Magazine, Chicago Magazine, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Heart Healthy Living, Georgia Trend and other magazines.

She is the author most recently of “Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA” (Free Press/Simon & Schuster 2010), on the international epidemic of drug-resistant staph in hospitals, families and farms, which won the 2011 Science in Society Award. Her previous book is “Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service” (Free Press/S&S 2004), the first history of the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service, for which she embedded with the corps for a year. Beating Back the Devil was named one of the Top Science Books of 2004 by Amazon.com and an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association.

As a newspaper reporter, she worked for 11 years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she was the only U.S. journalist assigned to full-time coverage of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She reported from the Indian Ocean tsunami and from Hurricane Katrina, as well as from Southeast Asia, India, Africa and the Arctic, and embedded with CDC teams on Capitol Hill during the 2001 anthrax attacks and with a World Health Organization polio-eradication team in India.

Previously, she worked for the Boston Herald, where stories she co-wrote on illnesses among veterans of the first Persian Gulf War led to the first Congressional hearings on Gulf War Syndrome, and at the Cincinnati Enquirer, where her stories on the association between local cancer clusters and contamination escaping a federal nuclear weapons plant contributed to a successful nuclear-harm lawsuit by residents. She was also previously a staff member at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy of the University of Minnesota.

Maryn has been an Ochberg Fellow of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University; a Media Fellow with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation; and a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. She has also served short fellowships at Harvard Medical School and the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families at the University of Maryland. In 2006, she was an inaugural Health Journalism Fellow of the East-West Center in Honolulu and is now an Associate of the Center and teaches other journalists in its programs in Asia.

She is a cum laude graduate of Georgetown University, has a master's degree with highest honors from Northwestern University, and is the recipient of numerous journalism awards.