Carl Zimmer is the author of  fourteen books about science. His latest book is Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive.

Zimmer’s column Matter appears each week in the New York Times. His writing has earned a number of awards, including the Stephen Jay Gould Prize, awarded by the Society for the Study of Evolution. In 2021 he was a member of the team at The New York Times that won the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. Three of his books have been named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review. His book She Has Her Mother’s Laugh won the 2019 National Academies Communication Award. The Guardian named it the best science book of 2018.

Zimmer is a familiar voice on radio programs such as Radiolab and professor adjunct at Yale University. He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after whom both a species of tapeworm and an asteroid have been named.