Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist, columnist, and author of six books, including 2018’s The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, and 2010’s The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. Her series on ethical issues in primate research for The Sacramento Bee won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting and became the starting point for 1994’s The Monkey Wars, her first book.

She is a former president of the National Association of Science Writers, was a member of the governing board of the World Federation of Science Writers, and currently serves on the board of advisors of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. Blum is co-editor of the book A Field Guide for Science Writers, and in 2015, she was selected as the fourth director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT.