Natalie Ann Wolchover (born October 16, 1986) is a science journalist.[1] She is a senior writer and editor for Quanta Magazine, and has been involved with Quanta's development since its inception in 2013.[1][2] In 2022 she won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.[3]
Wolchover was born in London, England and later moved to Blanco, Texas.[4]
Wolchover began her career freelancing for Make magazine and Seed, then worked as an intern for Science Illustrated.[5] She then became a staff writer for Life's Little Mysteries where she answered science questions, debunked paranormal claims and fake videos and wrote about new research.[5]
Wolchover has written for publications including Quanta Magazine, Nature, The New Yorker, Popular Science, and LiveScience.[6][7][1] Her articles are often syndicated to sites such as Wired, Business Insider, Nautilus, and The Atlantic.[8][9]
Awards judges have recognized Wolchover's ability to communicate complex ideas such as Bayesian statistics to a general audience.[10]
Wolchover writes on topics within the physical sciences, such as high-energy physics, particle physics, AdS/CFT, quantum computing, gravitational waves, astrophysics, climate change, and Gödel's incompleteness theorems.[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][excessive citations] Notable interviews include the highly cited theorists in high energy physics Ed Witten, Lisa Randall, Eva Silverstein, Juan Maldecena, Joe Polchinski, and Nima Arkani-Hamed.[20][21][22][23][24][25][26][excessive citations]
Wolchover obtained a bachelor's degree in physics from Tufts University, during which time she co-authored several publications in non-linear optics.[27][1] In 2009, Wolchover went on to study graduate-level physics at the University of California, Berkeley.[1][2] She left graduate school during the first year in order to pursue a career in science journalism.[1]
Wolchover lives in Brooklyn, New York with her wife.[30]