Jennifer Ouellette

This article is about the author. For the fashion designer, see Jennifer Ouellette (milliner).

Jennifer Ouellette (born May 18, 1964) is an American science writer and editor.

Jennifer Ouellette
Jennifer Ouellette in July 2012
Born	(1964-05-18) May 18, 1964 (age 61)[1]
Occupation	Writer and editor
Citizenship	United States
Education	BA English, Seattle Pacific University, 1985
Spouse	Sean M. Carroll ​ (m. 2007)​

Career

8th Freethought Alliance Conference in 2018.

Ouellette once maintained a website describing her as a "recovering English major who stumbled into science writing quite by accident as a struggling freelance writer in New York City."^[2] According to her husband, physicist Sean M. Carroll, Ouellette was hired by the American Physical Society "after they found out that it was easier to teach physics to people who knew how to write than to teach writing to people who knew physics."^[3]

Ouellette was the founding director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange,^[4] an initiative of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) designed to connect entertainment industry professionals with top scientists and engineers to help the creators of television shows, films, video games, and other productions incorporate science into their work.^[5]

The National Academy is hoping to basically foster this current trend in television and get more interactions between science and Hollywood, in the hopes of changing the way science and scientists are portrayed. [...] We want Hollywood to basically help us inspire people and to get them interested in science and in rationalism so that they then go on to read more and become more educated.^[6]

She also served as a Journalist in Residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in 2008^[7] and worked in New Mexico with the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop as an instructor in 2009.^[8]

From 1995 until 2004, Ouellette was a contributing editor of The Industrial Physicist magazine, published by the American Institute of Physics.^[9]

She thereafter worked as a freelance writer contributing to a physics outreach dialogue with articles in a variety of publications such as Physics World,^[10] Discover magazine,^[11] New Scientist,^[12] Physics Today,^[13] The Wall Street Journal.^[14] and Quanta Magazine^[15] Ouellette has given interviews to NPR's Science Friday and SETI's Seth Shostak, and appeared in panel discussions at The Amaz!ng Meeting,^[16] Dragon Con,^[17] Center for Inquiry, and the National Association of Science Writers.^[18] She appeared on NOVA in 2008 and on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson in 2011 to discuss her book The Calculus Diaries and winning a coveted Golden Mouth Organ.^[19]

Until September 2015, she wrote a blog for Scientific American titled Cocktail Party Physics,^[20] where she and other female contributors chatted about the latest science news: "You just tell entertaining stories and weave the science in and it’s a way of getting people familiar and interested in what is normally kind of a scary subject for them."^[6] In 2015, Ouellette became senior science editor at Gizmodo.^[20]

In 2018, she joined Ars Technica as a contributor.^[21] As of 2024^[update] she is a senior writer for the site.^[4]

She is a member of the Authors Guild and the National Association of Science Writers.^[2]

Awards

• Science writing award, Acoustical Society of America^[2]
• Humanist of the Year, American Humanist Association (AHA), 2018^[22]

Personal life

Ouellette holds a black belt in jiu jitsu.^[2] She is married to physicist Sean M. Carroll.^[23] They live in Baltimore, Maryland.^[4]

Accepting her Humanist of the Year award at the AHA's 2018 conference, Oullette spoke of her brother's struggle with and death from cancer, saying medical professionals should not "hide behind euphemisms and platitudes" that hinder end of life decision making, and about patients' need for frankness and honesty about their prognosis.^[24] She spoke about the suffering due to the limitations of the medical profession's current understanding of pain management and the need for research, and about her support for right-to-die legislation.^[24]

Books

• Jennifer Ouellette (2005). Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0143036036.
• ———— (2006). The Physics of the Buffyverse. illustrated by Paul Dlugokencky. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0143038621.
• ———— (2010). The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0143117377.
• ———— (2012). "Introduction". In Zivkovic, Bora (ed.). The Best Science Writing Online 2012. New York: Scientific American; Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0374533342. OCLC 824733257.
• ———— (2014). Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0143121657.