Jonathan Weiner majored in English at Harvard. He learned to write about science in the early 1980s while working at the magazine The Sciences. In 1985, Jonathan left the magazine to write his first book, Planet Earth, the companion volume to a seven-part PBS television series. He spent twenty years as an independent writer, and joined the School of Journalism in 2005.

Jonathan Weiner is one of the most distinguished popular-science writers in the country: his books have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Time, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Scientific American, Smithsonian, and many other newspapers and magazines, and he is a former editor at The Sciences. His books include The Beak of the Finch; Time, Love, Memory; and His Brother's Keeper. He lives in New York, where he teaches science writing at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.