About

Ashley Braun is an award-winning freelance science and environmental journalist based in Seattle, Washington. Her reporting has taken her from the United Nations climate summit in Morocco and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to California’s redwood forests and Washington’s salmon rivers. In her work, she enjoys exploring the dynamic relationships between humans and other species, as well as the intersections of science, policy, ethics, and society.

She works as an editor for the climate and energy investigative news site DeSmog and is a contributing science writer for Natural History Magazine.

Her work has appeared in Longreads, The Atlantic, Slate, Science, Scientific American, Hakai Magazine, bioGraphic, Audubon Magazine, Science News, Civil Eats, Crosscut, Medium, Discover Magazine, Popular Science, Earth Touch News, Grist.org, and OnEarth.org. In addition, she has employed her keen eye and attention to detail as a fact-checker for Science News, The New York Times Magazine and Opinion Audio desk, Rigged (a podcast by Amy Westervelt about disinformation), and other publications.

She formerly worked as an editor and writer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and even longer ago, she juggled a variety of responsibilities, such as writing, editing, news production, social media, and pun writing, at irreverent environmental news site Grist.org.

In 2023, Ashley was awarded a National Association of Science Writers (NASW) Science in Society Journalism Award in the science reporting category for her Hakai Magazine story, How Indigenous Sea Gardens Produced Massive Amounts of Food for Millennia. In 2020, she received second place for Outstanding Feature Story from the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) for her Longreads story, Research and Rescue: Saving Species From Ourselves. She has benefited from grants and fellowship opportunities from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources (IJNR), the Solutions Journalism Network, and AAAS/SciLine.

Ashley is the former president of the Northwest Science Writers Association and is a member of SEJ and the National Association of Science Writers.

Looking for just the right combination of Brains and Braun? Contact Ashley.

Photo credit: Lindsay Thomas Photos