Starre Julia Vartan

I worked on this project for Undark with fellow science journalist Jenny Morber for more than 6 months. It was a challenge, as we dug into government archives, spoke with scientists about emotionally fraught situations, and endeavored to tell their stories with integrity.

  This was a fascinating story to report and I added to my knowledge of artificial intelligence and its uses in medicine. “Researchers at DeepMind Health, a subsidiary of Google’s artificial-intelligence company DeepMind, and their colleagues…designed an artificial-intelligence algorithm to identify factors that suggest someone is at risk of AKI—and to predict it 48 hours…

Really happy to share a positive, optimistic and (hopefully) interesting conversation I had with Nils von Heijne for his podcast. We talked about “Nature and the Future of Humanity.” You can listen here.

Pleased to share my second article for National Geographic: This one came about because during a trail run with a big German Shepherd I was caring for, we came across a long-toed salamander. I didn’t recognize this species since I grew up in New York and this is a west-coast-only type of sal. I moved her…

Friend and fellow journalist Jim Motavalli thought my trip across the US in an $850 van he helped my buy in Connecticut and drove to Washington state was worth an article, and here it is! (You’ll have to read why I did such a thing—which led my friends in Connecticut to call me “eccentric”— in…

Pleased to have an honorable mention in this list of Best Short-form Science Writing!

I’ve been working on this article for years (in my head), so it’s amazing to finally see it in print! This is for Medium’s new science section, “Elemental” and it’s about how women are just as physically strong as men, and maybe stronger. If you disagree, read through the science I put together here, and think…

What a fascinating piece to research and report. From the article: “Would-be organ printers previously have been stymied by the complexity of certain organs. Our lungs and livers, for example, contain physically and biochemically entangled networks of blood vessels and airways (in the lung) or bile ducts (in the liver). Being able to recreate this…

For my first article National Geographic, a positive human-wildlife story! This story highlights a brand-new wildlife crossing on I90 east of Snoqualmie pass (my rainy-day pic, above) which unites animals from the north and south Cascades regions so their populations aren’t cut off from each other by a hazardous road. There are beautiful underpasses too. Read the story for more…