He won a scholarship to Birmingham-Southern College, where he majored in English, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.
Prior to writing books, Jefferson worked as a staff science writer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; as an educator and administrator at Planned Parenthood of East Tennessee; as a freelance magazine and newspaper journalist; and as a television documentary writer/producer.
[3] His writings have been published in The New York Times, Newsweek, USA Today and Popular Science, and have been broadcast on NPR.
[9] Jefferson is also the author of the 2018 standalone novel Wave of Terror, a thriller in which terrorists attempt to weaponize a large geologic fault in the Canary Islands.
By triggering a massive landslide on the island of La Palma, they hope to unleash an immense tsunami, powerful enough to devastate the entire eastern seaboard of the United States.