Erika Check Hayden

Director, Science Communication Program

University of California, Santa Cruz

Erika is a San Francisco-based journalist and director of the Science Communication Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She focuses on mentoring and collaborating to promote more inclusive science journalism and communication. Erika was a reporter at the science journal Nature for 15 years, where she covered biomedical research, specializing in genetics, infectious disease, and science in Silicon Valley, and won multiple awards, including for her work on the 2014 Ebola epidemic. She now writes for a variety of publications. She began her career at Newsweek magazine in New York.