Nadia Drake


Nadia Drake is an American science journalist and is the interim Physics Editor at Quanta Magazine. Previously, she was a contributing writer at National Geographic.

Early life and education

By 2002 Drake had earned an A.B. in biology, psychology, and dance at Cornell University,
She returned to Cornell for her Ph.D. in genetics and developmental biology in 2009. Her Ph.D. thesis is entitled Phenotypic consequences of imprinting perturbations at Rasgrf1 in mouse.
In 2011 she graduated from the University of California's Science Communication program at the Santa Cruz campus, with a Master of Science degree.

Career

Drake worked in a clinical genetics lab at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine while she was studying her Ph.D. in genetics.
During her residence at the UCSC's SciCom program, she was a reporting intern for the Santa Cruz Sentinel, San Jose's The Mercury News, and Nature.
Afterwards she moved to Washington, D.C. for an internship at Science News, which turned into a job as the magazine's astronomy reporter.
Drake then returned to the San Francisco Bay Area for a science reporting job at WIRED.
She has been a freelance contributor to The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, WIRED, and other publications.
In 2024 Drake joined the board of directors of the SETI Institute as observer.

Book

Drake is the author of Little Book of Wonders: Celebrating the Gifts of the Natural World.

Awards and honours

Drake is the daughter of SETI pioneer Frank Drake and Amahl Drake.