Nadia Drake is a freelance science journalist and covers everything from planets to animals to Silicon Valley tech, preferably from some remote, bug-soaked location like the tangled Amazon jungles of Peru. She has an astronomy blog on National Geographic's Phenomena network, and also writes for New Scientist, Nature, National Geographic, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Before making the official leap to freelance, Nadia covered science for Wired, and was on staff at Science News, writing about astronomy. In 2012, she won the D.C. Science Writers Association's Newsbrief Award. Nadia is a 2011 graduate of the U.C. Santa Cruz Science Communication program, and earned her Ph.D. in genetics from Cornell University. She likes the challenge of reporting from the field and has traveled to such places as China, Peru, Indonesian Borneo, and Alaska in pursuit of stories.