Author Carl Zimmer

in with She Has Her Mother’s Laugh—a sweeping, magisterial book that illuminates the very nature of who we are.”
Zimmer started out in science writing at Discover, where he eventually served for five years as a senior editor. He then went on to write hundreds of articles for magazines including National Geographic, Wired, and The Atlantic. In 2015, Zimmer became a contributing national correspondent for STAT, a publication about health and medicine, where he hosted “Science Happens,” a video series that was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. In 2004, Zimmer also launched “The Loom,” an award-winning blog which has been hosted by Discover and National Geographic.
His journalism has earned Zimmer many honors. In 2017, he won an Online Journalism Award for his “Game of Genomes” series for STAT. His work has been anthologized in both The Best American Science Writing series and The Best American Science and Nature Writing series. Zimmer is a three-time winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Journalism Award–twice for his work for The New York Times and once for his blog, The Loom. His other honors include the Pan-American Health Organization Award for Excellence in International Health Reporting, the American Institute Biological Sciences Media Award, and the Everett Clark Award for science writing. Zimmer has won the National Academies Science Communication Award for “his diverse and consistently interesting coverage of evolution and unexpected biology.” In 2011 he was elected to the board of directors of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. In 2015, the National Association of Biology Teachers awarded Zimmer with their Distinguished Service Award.
In 1998, Zimmer published his first book, At the Water’s Edge: Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore and Then Went Back to Sea. Since then, Zimmer has written a dozen more books, for which he has won fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Among his other books, Zimmer is the author of Soul Made Flesh, a history of neuroscience. It was named one of the top 100 books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, and dubbed a “tour-de-force” by The Sunday Telegraph. His book Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea was called “as fine a book as one will find on the subject” by Scientific American. The Los Angeles Times called Parasite Rex “a book capable of changing how we see the world.” Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, was hailed by The Boston Globe as “superb…quietly revolutionary.” It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize. Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed was featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and The Huffington Post. In 2015, the University of Chicago Press published the second edition of his book, A Planet of Viruses. Reviewing the book, the Washington Post declared, “Science writer Carl Zimmer accomplishes in a mere 100 pages what other authors struggle to do in 500: He reshapes our understanding of the hidden realities at the core of everyday existence.”
Zimmer is also the author of two widely praised textbooks. In 2009, he published The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution, the first textbook about evolution intended for non-majors. Edward O. Wilson of Harvard called it “excellent for students, the general public, and even other biologists.” Choice named it an academic title of the year. The second edition was published in 2013. Zimmer also co-authored Evolution: Making Sense of Life a textbook for biology majors, with University Montana biologist Doug Emlen. “Their text can only be described as an exciting moment for our field,” said Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago. The third edition of the book is scheduled to be published by Macmillan in September 2019.
In 2009, Zimmer began teaching workshops and seminars at Yale, and in 2017 he was appointed professor adjunct in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. He lives in Connecticut with his wife Grace and their children, Charlotte and Veronica.
He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after whom a species of tapeworm has been named.