[7] She worked as a reporter covering police, fires, courts, and other general assignment beats for newspapers in Georgia, Florida and California before she turned to science writing.

She was the first to report on the incidence of severely deformed waterfowl at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, where poor management of irrigation runoff had polluted the wetland with toxic levels of the element selenium.

Her work for the Fresno Bee put the mid-sized paper ahead of much larger regional rivals, including the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times in covering this major environmental story.

In Love at Goon Park, she explores the life and career of groundbreaking psychology researcher Harry Harlow, and in Ghost Hunters she follows a quest by 19th century psychologist-philosopher William James and colleagues to apply objective scientific methods to the study of paranormal phenomena.

[11][12][13] In 2013, she began writing "Poison Pen" which appears as a column in The New York Times and as a blog post in the newspaper's online edition.

The following year, she and former New York Times reporter and columnist Tom Zeller Jr. co-founded Undark, a digital science magazine published under the auspices of the KSJ program.