A New Reporter For Science

I am delighted to announce that Carolyn Y. Johnson of The Washington Post will be joining The Times as a science reporter. For those of you unfamiliar with Carolyn's byline, she has distinguished herself during her twenty-year-plus career - first at The Boston Globe, and later at The Post - as one of the science world's most versatile, lucid and engaging journalists.

Carolyn caught the science bug in high school, spending her summers working in molecular biology, materials science and physics labs ("lots of pipettes and lasers," she says), before majoring in physics and English at Amherst College. After college, she did the science writing master's program at MIT and then started at The Globe in 2004. By 2008, she had become their lead science reporter, and eventually was part of a team that covered a gruesome scientific detective story - a fungal meningitis outbreak that killed dozens of people - that was a Pulitzer finalist.

When she joined The Post in 2015, she initially covered health care for their finance team, focusing on the baffling economics of drug prices and access to health care. She moved to The Post's science desk shortly before the pandemic and wound up leading their coverage of vaccine and therapeutic development for Covid-19. She also wrote stepback explainers: about how hopes for the vaccines were dangerously high, how the lightning-fast vaccine development was based on decades of research, and how the Biblical-sounding immunological phenomenon of antigenic sin made booster strategy challenging.

"From the day Carolyn walked through the doors of The Boston Globe as an intern, one thing was sure: A star had been born - and she knew a thing or two about the celestial," said Steve Smith, deputy Metro editor, who was Carolyn's reporter colleague at The Globe and then editor at The Post. "She is among America's finest science writers, bringing unerring precision and uncommon panache to her work. She has deep regard for the scientific process, but is never bamboozled by it, recognizing that the same yearnings and frailties that define all human endeavor are also evident in the laboratory."

During the convulsions of the past year and a half, in and around her coverage of everything from Neanderthal dentistry to the science of coffee , Carolyn has anchored The Post's coverage of how the Trump administration is reshaping American research funding: by mining grants for keywords , making cuts that endangered cancer research for desperate patients, funding far fewer grants via an arcane budgetary shift and relying on five words inserted into an obscure regulation to terminate grants.

At The Times, Carolyn will continue to be a generalist, helping us cover the whole world of science, but we'll also be asking her to develop some specific lines of reporting in biotech and a handful of other beats. Since 2020, she has been based in Boulder, Colorado, which is a hub for science research and also offers easy travel access to the western half of the country. She'll remain based there for The Times, while making frequent visits to New York.

Please join me in welcoming her to The Times, and to the Science desk.

- Bill