Dava Sobel

Dava Sobel, who has an honorary doctor of letters degree from the University of Bath, is one of the most eminent writers and scientific popularisers in the United States. Over more than two decades she has been writing scientific articles and reports for The New York Times and other publications like Harvard Magazine, Science Digest, Discover, and The New Yorker. She has also written several books, among them The Planets (2005 – published in Catalan as Els Planetes, Edicions 62, 2006), Galileo’s Daughter (2000 – in Catalan as La filla de Galileu, Edicions 62, 2000), and Longitude (1995 – in Catalan as La longitud, Edicions 62, 1997), the latter of which, translated into more than twenty languages, has received several literary prizes, including the 1997 British Book of the Year award. More recently, she has published The Glass Universe (2016 – in Spanish as El universo de cristal, Capitán Swing, 2017), about a group of pioneering women at the Harvard Observatory who contributed towards the study of astronomy at the end of the nineteenth century. Dava Sobel has received numerous awards for her work as a scientific populariser, among them the Public Service Award del National Science Board (2001) and the 2014 Astronomical Society of the Pacific Award. In recent years, she has been a jury member for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and is also teaching science writing at the University of Chicago. Moreover, continuing her work of building bridges between science and society, she regularly gives public talks and writes for the online publication Aeon.