Carol Kaesuk Yoon was born and raised in Massachusetts, spending much of her childhood roaming around in the forest behind her house, that or reading comic books. At Yale she studied biology and then went on to get a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell, where she did research on the evolution and genetics of fruitfly mating songs.

After grad school, instead of getting a normal post-doctoral position, she became a fellow with a program that takes disgruntled science graduate students and plops them down into news outlets to try out being journalists. She was sent to The Oregonian, Portland’s daily paper where, to her amazement, since the only news she regularly read was the arts section, she fell in love with science news writing.

The following winter, she started writing for The New York Times as a news clerk in the science section until she left to become a regular and frequent contributor from afar here and afar there, lovely and interesting work where she was able to think and write about science for the Times, be edited by and interact with some really smart and cool people, and live wherever life took her.

Then in 2009, a longstanding fascination she had with taxonomy - which everyone thinks is dull and fusty, but is actually a bizarre and ancient practice that reveals fundamental truths about what it is to be human - led to the publication of her book Naming Nature.

She has lived for almost two decades in Bellingham, Washington with her husband, Merrill Peterson, a biologist at Western Washington University, and their son. Their daughter has fledged and makes art. She writes, plays with the family’s hypo-allergenic cat and reads. She also likes to go outside to look for animals, and she also spend a fair amount of time messing with her typewriter collection.