Mara Hvistendahl is an award-winning writer and journalist specializing in the intersection of science, culture, and policy. A correspondent for Science magazine focused on Asia, she has also written for Harper’s, Scientific American, Popular Science, The Financial Times, Foreign Policy, and other publications. Proficient in both Spanish and Chinese, she has spent much of the past decade in China, reporting on everything from archaeology to Beijing’s space program. She is the author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and The Consequences of a World Full of Men, published by PublicAffairs in June.

A former contributing editor at Seed magazine, correspondent for The Chronicle of Higher Education, and journalism professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, Mara sits on the advisory board of Round Earth Media, an organization founded to promote international journalism.

She holds a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College in comparative literature and Chinese and a master’s of science in magazine writing from Columbia University School of Journalism. Her writing has won an Education Writers Association award and been nominated for the Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Award. In 1998, while a senior in high school, she received a presidential medallion from President
Clinton.