Roberta Kwok is a freelance journalist who has covered science, technology, and the environment for more than a decade. Her work has appeared in NewYorker.com, NYTimes.com, Nature, New Scientist, Science News, Aeon, Audubon, Hakai, Sapiens, Quanta, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the San Francisco Chronicle, and U.S. News & World Report. She won the American Geophysical Union’s Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism (Features) in 2010 and an American Association for the Advancement of Science Kavli Science Journalism Award (silver) in children’s science news in 2016. Her flash essay “Click,” published in The Southern Review, was anthologized in The Best Small Fictions 2019. From 2020-21, she was a Project Fellow at MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Program.
Roberta has covered a wide variety of scientific topics, including the failure-ridden journey to build a synthetic genome, the mathematics of a marijuana-license lottery, strange cylindrical fossils that baffled botanists for a century, and the rush to track an Earth-bound asteroid that hit the Sudan desert. Other stories have delved into legal and policy issues, such as an investigation into the traffic deaths of three young chemists and a Supreme Court battle to untangle the murky reasons behind an oyster fishery collapse.
Roberta holds a BSc in biology with a minor in mathematics from Stanford University, an MFA in fiction writing from Indiana University Bloomington, and a graduate certificate in science communication from UC Santa Cruz. Before becoming a journalist, she worked as a software engineer in molecular biology research labs at Stanford’s School of Medicine and McGill University.