M. Mitchell Waldrop was the editorial page editor at Nature magazine from 2008 to 2010, and is currently a features editor at Nature. He earned a Ph.D. in elementary particle physics at the University of Wisconsin in 1975, and a master’s in journalism at Wisconsin in 1977. From 1977 to 1980 he was a writer and West Coast bureau chief for Chemical and Engineering News. From 1980 to 1991 he was a senior writer at Science magazine, where he covered physics, space, astronomy, computer science, artificial intelligence, molecular biology, psychology, and neuroscience. He was a freelance writer from 1991 to 2003 and from 2007 to 2008; in between he worked in media affairs for the National Science Foundation from 2003 to 2006. He is the author of Man-Made Minds (Walker, 1987), a book about artificial intelligence; Complexity (Simon and Schuster, 1992), a book about the Santa Fe Institute and the new sciences of complexity; and The Dream Machine (Viking, 2001), a book about the history of computing. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Amy E. Friedlander.

Pitch Guidelines

Sections: News of the Week, and News Features

Nature would like to build relationships with journalists around the world who are interested in telling in-depth stories about science, scientists and the intersection between science and society. Nature’s new and features sections publish agenda-setting, thought-provoking, can’t-put-down reads with strong narratives, compelling characters and rich reporting. They cover every aspect of science except clinical medicine, and are written with our core audience of working research scientists in mind. But they also appeal to a far broader readership. Anyone reading them should feel that they get inside access to science and scientific research: how it works, its challenges and its controversies.