Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer Ouellette is a recovering English major who stumbled into science writing quite by accident as a struggling freelance writer in New York City – and found it was the perfect career for her. She has been avidly exploring her inner geek ever since. Now based in Los Angeles, California, she is the author of two popular science books for the general public: The Physics of the Buffyverse (2007) and Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics (2006), both published by Penguin. She supplements her authorial income as a contributing editor of Physics Today, and of APS News, the monthly membership publication of The American Physical Society. She also works with the American Institute of Physics’ Discoveries and Breakthroughs in Science TV project, and has covered science policy issues for the Materials Research Society. Her freelance work has appeared in Discover, Salon, Nature, Symmetry, and New Scientist, among other venues, and she maintains a general science-and-culture blog called Cocktail Party Physics, featuring her avatar altar-ego/evil twin, Jen-Luc Piquant.

Over the course of her writing career (thus far), Ouellette has covered such varied topics as the acoustics of Mayan pyramids and New York City subways; the physics of bubbles; the biomechanics of yodeling; fractal patterns in the paintings of Jackson Pollock; the underlying science behind architectural arches; and the precarious pitfalls of pseudoscience. A former contributing editor for the now-defunct The Industrial Physicist, her 1997 article on concert hall acoustics for that publication garnered an award in science writing from the Acoustical Society of America. She holds a black belt in jujitsu, and has been known to draw upon that expertise from time to time to demonstrate the fundamentals of Newtonian mechanics to the general public.

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