Erik Vance

Erik Vance is an award-wining science writer based in Mexico City. His eclectic tastes keep him bouncing between archeology, neuroscience, psychology, conservation, and occasionally plate tectonics. But mostly he likes writing about the people in science – those who do it, control it, and are directly affected by it. Whether or not you like science doesn’t change the fact that science is happening to you all the time.

Erik graduated in biology from a small Midwestern college called Principia in 1999. After that he took a turn in research, advocacy, outdoor guiding, environmental consulting and half a dozen other job. He was arguably the worse waiter in Northern California for a year or so. The discovery of science writing and the UC Santa Cruz program changed his life and finally gave him a direction that he could embrace.

Since then, Erik has written for the New York Times, Harper’s, Scientific American, Nature, and National Geographic. Known for his narrative style and love of interesting characters, he writes a lot of profiles and even the stories that aren’t profiles still kind of feel like profiles. In 2016 he published his first book, Suggestible You, in which he was poked, prodded, burned, electrocuted, hypnotized and even cursed by a witchdoctor, all in the name of science.

Today he is nursing his wounds, raising his young son and looking into new stories to capture his constantly wandering mind.