Sarah Watson is a science journalist and author who has spent more than a decade covering the search for life beyond Earth. Her writing has appeared in Scientific American, New Scientist, The Atlantic, and Wired, and her long-form features on the outer solar system have been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She holds a master's degree in planetary science from Brown University and worked for three years as a researcher and science communicator with the Planetary Science Institute, giving her an insider's view of the missions she reports on.
She has written from the launch facilities at Cape Canaveral, from mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and from the clean rooms where spacecraft are assembled—including the build and launch of Europa Clipper, the mission that will carry this book's questions to Jupiter's ice. Her reporting on Enceladus's geysers and the discovery of subsurface oceans has been featured in documentaries and science podcasts, and she speaks regularly at astronomy festivals and planetariums.
*Alien Ocean Worlds* is her first book. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and spends her spare time teaching oceanography to elementary school students and arguing, gently, that the Pacific Ocean counts as an ocean world too.