Joan Slonczewski

Joan Lyn Slonczewski
Joan Slonczewski holds a computer printout object of sintered metal, received as WISCON Guest of Honor, 2013
Born	1956 Hyde Park, New York
Residence	Gambier, Ohio
Nationality	American
Occupation	Microbiology professor Science fiction author
Employer	Kenyon College
Known for	A Door into Ocean
Website	biology.kenyon.edu/slonc

Joan Lyn Slonczewski is an American microbiologist at Kenyon College and a science fiction writer who explores biology and space travel. Her books have twice earned the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel: A Door into Ocean (1987) and The Highest Frontier (2012). With John W. Foster she coauthors the textbook, Microbiology: An Evolving Science (W. W. Norton). She explores her ideas of biology, politics, and artificial intelligence at her blog Ultraphyte.

Slonczewski was born in 1956 at Hyde Park, New York and raised in Katonah, New York.

She earned an A.B. in biology, magna cum laude, from Bryn Mawr College in 1977. She completed a PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 1982 and post-doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania studying calcium flux in leukocyte chemotaxis. Since 1984 she has taught at Kenyon College, taking sabbatical leaves at Princeton University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Slonczewski's research focuses on the pH (environmental) stress response in Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis using genetic techniques.

Slonczewski teaches both biology and science fiction courses. From 1996 through 2008, she has been awarded Howard Hughes Medical Institute funding for undergraduate biological sciences education, which she uses to improve science instruction and to foster summer science fellowships for minority and first-generation students.