Bio
Christie Nicholson is a science journalist based in New York by way of Toronto and Halifax. Her academic and professional careers have blended biology, psychology, and pop culture for the last 15 years.
Nicholson studied philosophy at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, and biological science at the University of Toronto. While studying in Toronto, she worked for four years with bipolar and schizophrenic patients at Canada’s Clarke Institute of Psychiatry (now known as the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.)
Inspired by her passion for human and animal behavior, she decamped for Borneo in 1998, where she spent the better part of that year studying orangutans in the rain forests of South Kalimantan.
Nicholson then made the move to New York in 1999, at the height of its “Silicon Alley” days. She worked as a new media producer for over seven years, publishing award-winning sites for corporate and non-profit companies.
Nicholson received her master’s from Columbia University’s School of Journalism, as an award-winning student graduating in the top of her class.
At Scientific American online, she developed and launched an online community, and helped launch two video series (Instant Egghead and The Monitor), and two audio podcasts (60-Second Psych and 60-Second Earth).
She is a contributing editor at SciAm and produces and hosts the weekly podcast, 60-Second Psych. She also co-hosts a new weekly science video series, Grand Unified Weekly, on Slate.com. With two fellow journalists, she created and produced the “Science of Sex,” an acclaimed Web publication. This year, their site won a Webby and a People’s Voice award. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, The Austin-American Statesman, The Arizona Republic, The Montreal Gazette and other papers in the U.S. and Canada.
While not working hard to make cool science accessible, you’ll find her in Brooklyn interrogating a friendly stranger, dreaming up another new business idea, or if it’s August, swimming with the seals in the Northumberland Strait.
Follow her thoughts and days on Twitter. Reach her here: christie.nicholson@gmail.com.