Plenary Sessions

Ed Yong is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter whose fascinating presentations on animals and the natural world are infused with humor, joy, wonder, and infectious enthusiasm. His New York Times-bestselling book, An Immense World, is an astounding tour of the radically different ways that animals perceive the world. Yong dives into each animal’s umwelt—their specific “sensory bubble”—with curiosity and awe, exploring how different senses like heat, sound, smell, and echolocation inform how animals interact with their surroundings.

After years of pandemic reporting left him burnt out and struggling with his mental health, Yong turned to a new hobby—birdwatching—to help him heal and reconnect with his original beat of nature writing. In birdwatching, Yong found a much deeper connection to the natural world. Now, Yong speaks about how exploring your environment can be restorative as well as informative.

A New York Times bestseller, An Immense World won the Andrew Carnegie Medal, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, and was longlisted for the PEN America 2023 Literary Award, as well as appearing on many Best Books of the Year lists. In 2025 the book was a recipient of the Science + Literature award by the National Book Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. A beautiful, full-color adaptation of An Immense World for Young Readers will be published in May 2025.

Ed Yong is also the bestselling author of I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us, a groundbreaking, informative, and entertaining examination of the relationship between animals and microbes.

He won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Exemplary Reporting for his coverage of the pandemic, as well as the George Polk Award for science reporting; the Victor Cohn Prize for medical-science reporting; the Neil and Susan Sheehan Award for investigative journalism; the John P. McGovern Award from the American Medical Writers Association; and the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for in-depth reporting. In 2024, Yong was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for his trailblazing science writing. A longtime science reporter for The Atlantic, his work has also appeared in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, Nature, New Scientist, and Scientific American, among others.