Elizabeth Finkel

Elizabeth Finkel is Editor in Chief of Cosmos Magazine, a popular science magazine that she co-founded in 2005. It represents her third metamorphosis in an entirely scientific career.

She began with a PHD in biochemistry from Melbourne University. Then at the University of California, San Francisci, she explored the age-old mystery of how the mush of an egg is sculpted into an embryo. Her work using fruit flies was published in Nature.

Returning to Melbourne in 1998, she turned to freelance journalism to strike a better balance between career and parenting. She regularly contributed to the American magazine Science, the ABC Science Show and Cosmos magazine. She also authored two books: "Stem Cells: Controversy at the Frontiers of Science" in 2005, which won the Queensland premier's Literary award and "The Genome Generation" in 2012, which was on the recommended reading list at Texas A&M. Her articles are often anthologised in Best Australian Science Writing.

She became Editor in Chief of Cosmos in 2013. She has won numerous journalism awards, most recently, the 2015 Eureka Award for Science Journalism. In 2013 she was honoured to be made a Vice Chancellor's fellow at La Trobe University. In 2016, she was recognised with an Order of Australia.