Maryn McKenna is a journalist and author covering public health and global health, a contributing writer at Scientific American, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University, where she teaches health and science writing and storytelling. She is the recipient of the 2023 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting, a career award, and the 2019 AAAS-Kavli Gold Award for magazine writing for her piece "The Plague Years" in The New Republic. She is the author of the 2017 bestseller
BIG CHICKEN: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats, which received the 2018 Science in Society Award and was named a best book of 2017 by Amazon, Smithsonian, Science News, Wired, Civil Eats, and other publications (and is published in the UK and other territories under the title
Plucked) as well as the award-winning books
Superbug and
Beating Back the Devil. She appeared in the Vox+ Netflix documentaries “Pandemics: Explained” and “Coronavirus: Explained”; the 2019 documentary
Resistance Fighters, which won top prizes at the Vancouver and Paris film festivals;
and the 2014 documentary
Resistance. Her 2015 TED Talk, "
What do we do when antibiotics don't work anymore?" has been viewed more than 2 million times and translated into 34 languages. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, WIRED, National Geographic, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and The Guardian, among many other publications. She also has received the 2019 John P. McGovern Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication, the 2014 Leadership Award of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, and the 2013 Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Life Sciences, among many other honors. She was a 2018 Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale University and a Knight Foundation science journalism fellow at MIT and the University of Michigan.