Marguerite Holloway

Marguerite Holloway has written about science — including climate change, natural history, environmental issues, public health, physics, neuroscience and women in science — for publications including the New York Times, the New Yorker, Natural History, Wired and Scientific American, where she was a long-time writer and editor. She is the author of The Measure of Manhattan, the story of John Randel Jr., the surveyor and inventor who laid the 1811 grid plan on New York City, and of the researchers who use his data today (W.W. Norton, 2013). She wrote the introduction to the most recent edition of Manhattan in Maps (Dover, 2014).

Holloway enjoys interdisciplinary teaching and often collaborates with colleagues working in documentary, photojournalism and animation — particularly in the realm of climate change storytelling. She has worked on several innovative interdisciplinary digital and data projects. She and colleagues at Columbia and Stanford universities had a Magic Grant from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation to develop Science Surveyor, a prototype for an algorithmic tool to improve science journalism. Holloway and colleagues from Fordham and Brown universities worked on The Templeton Project, a sensor-based effort to chronicle the story of New York City’s rats, funded by the Tow Center for Digital Media.

Holloway has a B.A. in comparative literature from Brown University and an M.S. from the Journalism School. She won the Distinguished Teacher of the Year award in 2001 and a Presidential Teaching Award in 2009; the New York Observer named her one of the city’s top professors in 2014.