Christie Aschwanden | |
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| Alma mater | University of Colorado Boulder University of California, Santa Cruz |
| Awards | AAASKavli Science Journalism Award |
Christie Aschwanden is an American journalist and the former lead science writer atFiveThirtyEight. Her 2019 bookGOOD TO GO: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn From the Strange Science of Recovery, was aNew York Times bestseller. She was awarded anAmerican Association for the Advancement of ScienceKavli Science Journalism Award in 2016 and serves on the board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.
Aschwanden is the daughter of aUnited States Air Force fighter pilot.[1] She was a high school track star. Aschwanden studied biology at theUniversity of Colorado Boulder, where, alongside her studies, she was a professional cyclist.[2] During her summers she interned atScienceNOW, the web news service of the journalScience.[2] After graduating she worked as a research assistant in a laboratory inBoulder.[2] Whilst she briefly considered applying for a doctorate, she did not want to specialize.[3] During her time as a researcher Aschwanden discovered the popular-science magazineNew Scientist and decided that she would like to be ascience journalist.[3] She attended a science writing workshop in Santa Fe in 1996.[4] She eventually studiedscience communication atUniversity of California, Santa Cruz and graduated in 1998.[5]
Aschwanden is interested in the research process, and spent 2015 investigating whether science was “broken”.[6] Her investigations considered scientific misconduct and fraud, and found that whilst these cases made headlines, they were a "mere distraction" from science itself.[7][8] She has studiedP-hacking, a method that involves narrowing or expanding data sets to prove a particular hypothesis.[7] Scientific results are influenced by the analytical decisions of researchers, and whilst they are usually in "good faith", they can bias the way evidence is interpreted. She went on to show that the science of nutrition wasn't clean-cut; owing to difficulties in relying on self-reported diets, and how the act of self-reporting changes how one chooses food.[9] During her investigations Aschwanden demonstrated that, to a certain p-value, eating shellfish was linked to being right handed and that eating cabbage was linked to having aninnie bellybutton.[9] Her reporting was the first to reveal the statistical and reproducibility issues in sports science, in particularly, concerns over magnitude-based inference (MBI).[10] MBI is a statistical method that was developed by a group of Australian sport scientists. It has received widespread criticism for not being robust – the sample sizes are too small and the conclusions are not backed up by enough evidence.[11]
In 2013, Aschwanden proposed theFinkbeiner test, a checklist to end gender bias in journalism.[12]
GOOD TO GO: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn From the Strange Science of Recovery, Aschwanden's first book, explored the science of exercise recovery.[13][14] It looks at the tools that have been developed to optimize recovery, including nutrition, mental health andinflammation.[15] The book made theNew York Times Sports & Fitness best sellers list.[16]
She spent 2013 as aCarter Center Fellow, and 2014 as aSanta Fe Institute Journalism Fellow.[17][18] In 2019 Aschwanden was the science writer in residence at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison where she spoke about the use and abuse of scientific evidence.[19] Aschwanden produces the podcastEmerging Form, which discusses the creative process.[20] She has spoken at theAspen Ideas Festival.[21] Her writing has appeared inRunner's World,The New York Times,The Washington Post andNew Scientist. She serves on the board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, and was formerly the lead science writer forFiveThirtyEight.[22] She has said that she liked working atFiveThirtyEight because she could create excitinginfographics.[3]
Aschwanden is an endurance athlete.[1] She has been involved in athletics, cycling and skiing. She raced professionally as a member of the Team RossignolNordic skiing squad. She is married and lives with her husband, Dave Aschwanden, and numerous animals in westernColorado on a small winery.[19][29] The winery producesChill Switch Wines.
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