UCSB Arts & Lectures Presents Science Journalist Ed Yong Wednesday, May 6. 7:30 p.m., UCSB Campbell Hall

SUMMARY

“Yong succeeds brilliantly in shedding light on these alien worlds – worlds that drift around us every day, like plankton around a scallop, but whose richness and extravagant strangeness we rarely pause to examine.” The Guardian (U.K.)

“To perceive the world through other senses is to find splendor in familiarity, and the sacred in the mundane.” – Ed Yong

UCSB Arts & Lectures presents Ed Yong: The Amazing Nature of Animal Senses on Wednesday, May 6 at 7:30 p.m. at UCSB Campbell Hall. Bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong invites audiences on a thrilling journey into the hidden worlds of animal senses. Based on his acclaimed book An Immense World, this eye-opening evening explores how other creatures experience sights, sounds, smells and sensations far beyond our own human perception. With humor, wonder and dazzling storytelling, the winner of the 2021 George Polk Award for science reporting reveals a planet alive with electric messages, magnetic maps and vibrations we cannot feel. Yong’s work challenges us to see the world not only as it appears to humans, but as it is through the eyes, ears and skins of other species.

Related Thematic Learning Initiative Events:
Bird Walks with Santa Barbara Audubon Society, Apr 29 (8 a.m., 10 a.m. and 12 p.m.)

ABOUT ED YONG

Ed Yong is a British-American science journalist and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of two bestselling books.  

For his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ed won the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism; the George Polk Award for science reporting; the Benton Award for distinguished public service; the Victor Cohn Prize for medical science reporting; the Neil and Susan Sheehan Award for investigative journalism; the John P. McGovern Award from the American Medical Writers’ Association; and the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for in-depth reporting. He was also a two-time finalist for the National Magazine Award in public service, and was described as “the most important and impactful journalist of 2020” by Poynter. 

He is the author of two New York Times bestsellers: An Immense World, about the extraordinary sensory worlds of other animals; and I Contain Multitudes, about the amazing partnerships between animals and microbes. An Immense World won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize; it was also a finalist for four other major awards and was ranked as one of the top books of the year by the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, the Economist, People, Barack Obama and more than 30 other lists. 

Ed was a staff writer at the Atlantic from 2015 to 2023. Prior to that, his writing also featured in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, the New York Times, Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American and other publications. He regularly does talks and interviews, and his TED talk on mind-controlling parasites has been watched by over 1.9 million people. His work has appeared in three editions of the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology, which he then guest-edited in 2021. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024. 

Ed is a proud member of Liminal – a science communication collective focused on sense-making, which was co-founded by his wife Liz Neeley. Liminal’s approach to science communication is deeply personal, politically engaged, and massively multidisciplinary. Through coaching, training and collaborations, the collective makes science communication make sense to scientists, to help science make sense for everyone.

Ed cares deeply about empathetic, accurate, nuanced and curiosity-driven reporting. Through his journalism, he tries to not only describe what is happening but also help people make sense of it, to bear witness to suffering, to speak truth to power, to reveal wonder in the obscure and to push for a more just and equitable world. He has written about the origin of life itself and the modern-day extinction crisis; the way science is conducted and the scientists who are fighting to make it more reliable and inclusive; the people who are still suffering from the long-lasting consequences of viral infections and the societal forces that said infections reveal and exploit; and the invisible microbes that profoundly shape our lives and the imperceptible information that other animals can detect with their amazing senses. 

He is married to Liz Neeley, founder of Liminal Creations, and is parent to Typo, a corgi. They live in Oakland, California.

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