About Alan

Alan Burdick writes for numerous publications including The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, GQ, OnEarth, The Week, and Natural History. He has also worked as an editor at The New York Times Magazine, Discover, and The Sciences, and was the editorial producer and senior writer for Science Bulletins, a multimedia science-news division of the American Museum of Natural History. He is currently a contributing editor at OnEarth, where he writes the Synthesist column about technology and nature.

Alan’s first nonfiction book, Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Overseas Press Club award for environmental reporting. His writing has been included in the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology; he also was awarded the AAAS Westinghouse prize for magazine feature-writing and was a co-recipient of the  Olive Branch Award. He has been in residence several times at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and has been awarded grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Born and raised in Syracuse, N.Y., Alan graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in the history and philosophy of science. He lives with his family outside New York.