About
Kat McGowan is a journalist and editor in California focused on healthcare, medicine, and biological research. She sees science reporting as a way to explore the zone where new ideas come into contact with politics, money, and power.
Experience
Kat started her career as an urban policy reporter for a City Limits, a small but mighty investigative magazine in New York City, then became a reporter at GenomeWeb during the heyday of the Human Genome Project and later a special projects editor at Discover. Since then she has helped craft a wide range of special editorial projects at various science and medical publications.
As a reporter and writer, she’s covered everything from crow brains to chikungunya to parthenogenesis; her feature on memory was anthologized in Best American Science & Nature Writing. For Popular Science, she’s written about the origins of life on Earth, the domestication of dogs, and the scientific search for a fountain of youth in blood. She is a 2022 recipient of the Alicia Patterson Foundation grant, pursuing in-depth reporting on caregiving.
Education
Kat graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in semiotics (honors thesis) and an Sc.B. in neuroscience, then went to New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program for a master’s degree.
