Hello! Servus!
I’m Elise, a US-American science journalist living in Graz, Austria. I write stories about scientific research — mainly physics and geoscience — for magazines like Quanta, National Geographic, Scientific American, and Science News with a special focus on the German-speaking countries and their geographic neighborhood.
Like many science writers, I was a scientist before I figured out that doing science is (for me) substantially less fun than writing about it.
In 2019, I earned my M.S. in Earth Science at MIT, where I studied how bacteria snot transforms into rock. I then jumped into writing with a AAAS Mass Media Fellowship at Voice of America. Before that, I earned my B.S. in Geobiology at Caltech and spent a Fulbright at the University of Southern Denmark in 2020.
My core beat is now physics and geoscience, but I also love writing about my pet topics, language and birds, whenever I can convince an editor to let me. I’ve written for National Geographic, Quanta, Scientific American, Discover, Science News, Eos, Sky & Telescope, and more.
When I’m not hunting down researcher emails or re-re-re-writing a lede, I’m probably either trying to learn a real language or making up a fake one.
I speak English and German and am happy to correspond in either language // Ich spreche Englisch und Deutsch und korrespondiere gern in beiden Sprachen.
Science Writing
Biophysicists Uncover Powerful Symmetries in Living Tissue
After identifying interlocking symmetries in mammalian cells, scientists can describe some tissues as liquid crystals — an observation that lays the groundwork for a fluid-dynamic theory of how tissues move
Read moreThis mathematician is making sense of nature’s complexity
Hungarian scholar Gábor Domokos aims to understand the physical world by describing its forms in the simplest possible geometry
Read moreThe Simple Geometry That Predicts Molecular Mosaics
By treating molecules as geometric tessellations, scientists devised a new way to forecast how 2D materials might self-assemble.
Read more
Elise Cutts
Science Writer
How to say my name