Olivia Judson works at the intersection between science and journalism. A former staff writer for The Economist, she has written for a wide range of newspapers and magazines, including National Geographic, The Guardian, and The New York Times (where, for two years, she wrote a weekly online column). Her academic background, however, is in evolutionary biology, and she is currently writing a history of life and Earth, aimed at a general audience. While at the MPIWG, she is planning to research the history of the ideas that she is developing, with a particular focus on work that was done by scientists educated in St Petersburg in the 1880s, such as Vladmir Vernadsky and Sergei Winogradsky.