Jessica Snyder Sachs is a contributing editor to Popular Science and writes regularly for Discover, National Wildlife, Health, Parenting, and other national publications. Prior to becoming a full-time freelance writer in 1991, she was the managing editor of Science Digest. Jessica's critically acclaimed trade book, Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World, is now out in paperback, published by Hill&Wang/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. She continues to contribute to a variety of digital science curricula for Grolier and its parent company, Scholastic. In addition to science journalism and educational writing, Jessica works with leading medical specialists and researchers to craft their journal articles and continuing medical education materials. Jessica's 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. Another of her Discover features--"DNA Pollution May be Spawning Killer Microbes"--was included in Best American Medical Writing 2009. As an adjunct professor, Jessica teaches feature writing and writing for magazines, most recently at Seton Hall University. She has taught at the graduate level as part of New York University's 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.
