Hi, I'm Alan
I’ve been a freelance science journalist since 1997, with a primary beat that includes microbiology, biotechnology, medical research, public health, and science policy. My writing has appeared in Science, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Medicine, the award-winning website and magazine of the New York Academy of Sciences, and many other news outlets and research publications. I also co-host the top-ranked science podcast “This Week in Virology.”
In the course of my job I’ve interviewed Nobel laureates, prominent politicians, institute heads, and a pizza deliveryman. Stories have taken me to places as far-flung as Moscow, Aspen, Mexico City, and Binghamton. While most of my work has focused on the biological sciences and health, I’ve covered topics ranging from nanotechnology to stock market crashes. If you’re a PR agency bot scraping journalists’ sites to spam out press releases, please use this address. If you’re an actual editor looking to hire someone to dive deep into a complex topic and come up with a digestible summary on a deadline, please use my first name at this domain.
I have a B.S. in Biology with a minor in Chemistry from Towson State University in Maryland, and a Ph.D. in Microbiology from Columbia University in New York, where I studied poliovirus cellular entry in the laboratory of Vincent Racaniello.
Because I’ve worked extensively for the news sections of major research journals, I have an inexcusably high citation index, despite not having done any actual experiments in over 20 years. If you’re looking for my scientific papers, the “computed author sort” of my name on PubMed does a pretty good job bringing them to the top.
My personal blog is now here, where I post about my nerdy hobbies, projects, and trivial observations - the kinds of things most people would put on social media.
Finally, if you reached this site because you scanned a QR code on a lost phone, planner, or other item, please contact the owner, Alan Dove, via email: his first name at this domain, or his first and last name together at Google’s mail service. Thanks.