About
Jocelyn Solis-Moreira (she/her) is a science contributor at Popular Science. She covers a range of topics, including neuroscience, climate change, mental health, and infectious diseases. When Jocelyn’s done writing for the day, you’ll find her flying through the air in an aerial studio.
Experience
Jocelyn is a freelance health and science writer who made the leap into journalism when the COVID pandemic turned the world upside down. Starting off as an editorial assistant for a cancer news site, she eventually moved more into writing when the world wanted coverage of the virus. There she worked to debunk misinformation on vaccines and documented bizarre events like COVID tongue. Her experience as a graduate neuroscience researcher studying alcohol addiction made her well-equipped to explain new scientific discoveries and translate medical jargon into information people can use in their everyday lives.
Jocelyn has since branched out into writing about other health and science topics, with the brain being her favorite subject to nerd out on. Working with some great editors, Popular Science has given Jocelyn an opportunity to push the boundaries of her writing, from writing about quirky animal stories such as the exclusive handshakes chimpanzees give to other group members to in-depth analysis of current events like how the future of the Amazon rainforest rode on Brazil’s 2022 presidential election.
She is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the National Association of Science Writers, where she gave a talk on the importance of science communication in K-12 for their 2020 conference.
Education
Jocelyn has a BS in Integrative Neuroscience with a minor in Education from Binghamton University. She went on to pursue a Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience, researching the neurochemical effects of adolescent binge drinking though she realized mid-way when teaching a neuroscience lab course that she enjoyed talking about science more than spending hours behind a lab bench. She left with her Master’s in Psychology and now works as a freelance health and science writer.
Highlights
- News reporter specializing in health and science and a freelance editor for multiple health articles in Everyday Health, Dotdash Meredith, Sharecare, and Healthline.
- Master’s in psychology with years conducting neuroscience research.
- Bylines have appeared in publications such as Discover Magazine, Yahoo, Live Science, Forbes Health, and the Scholastic SuperScience print magazines.
Notable Works
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A mythological Norse beast may have just been a weird, hungry whale
PopSci
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Is it OK to drink blood?
PopSci
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Ancient frozen viruses don’t pose a threat to your health—yet
PopSci
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A swamp orgy went terribly wrong for these prehistoric frogs
PopSci
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The US can’t agree on what a ‘life-saving abortion’ means
PopSci
Favorite weird science fact
Anglerfish are the clingy boyfriends of the sea. When they find a female, they latch on and permanently fuse their bodies together. The cost of forcing themselves onto their unwilling mate is the loss of their eyes, fins, and other body parts until they’re nothing but an appendage with testes.
