Carol became a science writer in a very roundabout fashion. She was born and raised in Sherborn, Massachusetts and went to the local public schools through high school. From there she went on to study biology at Yale, from which her parents intended she should graduate and go on to become a medical doctor (an Asian-American family obsession/malady). She graduated in 1985, winning the university’s Boell Prize in Biology, and having becoming completely besotted with evolutionary biology. She told her father that since her grades at college had been so spotty, she’d have a better chance of getting into medical school if she went to grad school for a bit. A long bit later, exactly six years, she finished a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell in 1991, as a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, having studied the evolution and genetics of fruitfly mating songs. But while she had had every intention of becoming a professor of biology, that was not to be.
Carol went on to an unusual post-doctoral position, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Mass Media, Science and Engineering Fellowship. In this program, AAAS takes scientists of all stripes - most of them disgruntled graduate students - and puts them into media outlets to write news about science. Carol was sent to The Oregonian, Portland’s daily paper where she fell in love with news writing. What a glorious breath of fresh air compared with what could be the stultifying labor-camp, sensory-deprivation tank of graduate school. It was equally exciting to find that The Oregonian was in 1991 an amazingly diverse news room that included women, Asian-American, Native-American, Latino and Latina, African-American and openly gay journalists all working with an African-American editor-in-chief.
The following winter, with a grand total of one summer’s worth of newsroom experience under her belt, Carol began writing for The New York Times first as a news clerk (read: lowly grunt worker, running errands and messages, sorting mail, wondering why she spent years getting a PhD in order to make xeroxed copies) then later as a regular and frequent contributor from afar.
Carol lives in Bellingham, Washington with Merrill Peterson, a biologist at Western Washington University, and their two children. For fun she likes to drink coffee and eat pastries at the Mount Bakery, a Belgian bakery and cafe where she wrote much of Naming Nature and many New York Times articles. She also likes to go outside to look for animals, to read (currently reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers and The Best Buddhist Writing 2004), to watch movies, bake, walk in Bellingham’s historic neighborhoods (see how we got our college-party neighborhood designated a National Register Historic District here) and paint really large watercolor portraits of very small insects. (Note: the gorgeous mantid featured on the pages of this website was not painted by Carol. It is from Jean Henri Fabre’s Book of Insects (1912) and is the work of English artist, Edward Julius Detmold.)
