Roxanne Khamsi is an independent science journalist and editor. Her articles have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Economist, Popular Science, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Slate, Nature, New York magazine, WIRED magazine and National Geographic.

Roxanne has received recognition for her work, including the Walter C. Alvarez Award from the American Medical Writers Association. Her March 2020 article, They Say Coronavirus Isn’t Airborne—but It’s Definitely Borne By Air, which was the first major news piece to argue that the pandemic coronavirus could transmit readily through air, was included in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021 anthology. Roxanne’s feature story The Mystery of Why Some People Keep Testing Positive for Covid-19 received a 2021 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award. Additionally, she received a first-place award from the Association of Health Care Journalists in the trade publication category for her story about insurance issues plaguing medical foods and another first-place award from the association for her feature about doctors fighting cancer by harnessing our knowledge of evolution. Her piece about the ethical and scientific challenges of long-acting injectable antipsychotic drugs earned her a Mental Health America Media Award for Coverage of Mental Health Research. Roxanne has also been recognized with a Guild of Health Writers Award for best young writer and the Global Health Council’s Excellence in Media Award, as well as a career development grant from the National Association of Science Writers. She is a former fellow in the UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship program and a recipient of a 2017-2018 Genetics and Human Agency Journalism Fellowship. She also served on the Editorial Advisory Board of TEDMED.

For more than a decade, Roxanne served as Chief News Editor at Nature Medicine, a monthly biomedical journal published by Nature Publishing Group. Before joining Nature Medicine, Roxanne worked as an online reporter for New Scientist, writing daily stories about biomedical research. In addition to her work as a writer and editor, she has taught at Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York, through the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, and at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Roxanne earned her degree in biology from Dartmouth College, with a concentration in genetics. She was based in Brooklyn for many years and is now living in Montreal.

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Photo by Brian Friedman.