Jessica Snyder Sachs is a contributing editor to Popular Science and Parenting magazines and writes regularly for Discover, National Wildlife, and other national publications. Prior to becoming a full-time freelance writer in 1991, she managed and edited Science Digest.
She has recently completed her second book for the general reader, Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World, scheduled for fall 2007 publication by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
While Good Germs, Bad Germs explores the bacterial ecosystems that imbue a healthy human body, Jessica's first book, Corpse (Perseus/Basic Books), explored the dynamic ecosystem of insects, plants, and bacteria that colonize the body after death. Subtitled "Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death," Corpse describes the 200-year pursuit of an accurate postmortem clock and features the casework of the world's leading forensic entomologists, botanists, and anthropologists.
Jessica takes special pride in authoring several volumes of Grolier's New Book of Popular Science, an award-winning set of encyclopedias widely used in libraries and secondary schools.
Jessica's recent honors have included the Fund for Investigative Journalism's 2006 book award, fellowships from the Alicia Patterson Foundation and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and a research grant from the Sloan Foundation. Also in 2006, her Discover feature on the effects of antibiotics on the body's "good" bacteria was selected for inclusion in the anthology Best American Science and Nature Writing.
As an adjunct professor, Jessica teaches feature writing and writing for magazines, most recently at Fordham, Kean, and New York universities, the latter as part of its graduate-level Science and Environmental Reporting Program (SERP).
She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School, where she completed a mid-career masters with cross-disciplinary graduate studies in immunology, microbiology, and infectious disease. She lives with her husband and daughter in New Jersey.
For more information, please request a CV.