Seth Mnookin is a Professor of Science Writing and the Director of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, won the National Association of Science Writers “Science in Society” Award and the New England chapter of the American Medical Writers Association’s Will Solimene Award for Excellence. He is also the author of the 2006 New York Times bestseller Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top, which chronicles the challenges and triumphs of the John Henry-Tom Werner ownership group of the Boston Red Sox. His first book, 2004’s Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year.

Since 2014, he’s been an elected board member of the National Association of Science Writers, and from 2004 to 2018, he was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he wrote about the American media presence in Iraq, Bloomberg News, and Stephen Colbert.

Seth’s essays and reporting have been featured in the anthologies about science, sports, and popular culture. His 2014 New Yorker piece on rare genetic diseases won the American Medical Writers Association prize for best story of the year and was included in the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. He has also written for numerous other publications, including New York, Wired, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Spin, Slate, and Salon.com. A former music columnist for The New York Observer, he began his journalism career as a rock critic for the now-defunct webzine Addicted to Noise and has also worked as a crime reporter at The Palm Beach Post, a city hall reporter at the Forward, a presidential campaign reporter at Brill’s Content, a jack-of-all-trades at Inside.com, and a media columnist at Newsweek. He graduated from Harvard College in 1994 with a degree in History and Science, and was a 2004 Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. A native of Newton, Massachusetts, he and his wife currently live outside of Boston with their twelve-year-old dog, their seven-year-old son, and their five-year-old daughter.