Anika Jane Beamer is a Midwesterner and a writer with a background in the biological sciences. She’s spent years researching and thinking about life’s little guys—viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Now, she’s interested in writing about how manmade changes to the environment are transforming microscopic life, for better and worse.

Anika Jane has spent the last two years as the science writer for Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. There, she shared stories about research, faculty, and students in fields as far-flung as robotics, galaxy formation, water geochemistry, and lung cancer. She sees herself as a translator, deconstructing the “language of science” to ensure that the hard-to-see, and harder-to-fathom, can be understood by a wide audience. Whether hiking, painting, birdwatching, or playing soccer, she’s often thinking about her place in nature and the science that surrounds her.