Kelly Rae Chi is a freelance science and technology journalist whose writing has appeared in Scientific American, The Scientist, Nature Methods and other publications.

She was a Roy H. Park Fellow and graduated from the medical journalism master's program in May 2008. Her master’s thesis explored the psychology of the simple living movement.

In her first year in the program, Kelly was science writing fellow with the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center. At Morehead, she wrote and edited text for a new science exhibit for children, called Zoom In, about the size of science from cells to space. In the summer of 2007 after her first year in the program, she was a reporting intern with The Scientist, a life sciences trade magazine based in Philadelphia.
Kelly received a bachelor’s degree in neurobiology and physiology from Purdue University in 2003. At Purdue, she worked in a research lab where she helped develop new methods to assess feeding behavior in mice.

After graduation from Purdue, Kelly attended graduate school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she received a master’s degree in biology. Her master’s project examined the brain’s role in detecting hypoglycemia in rats. While at Illinois, she began writing for the student-run newspaper, The Daily Illini, and discovered her passion to write about science.

Kelly resides in Garner, N.C., with her husband and three cats.

Selected clips:

“Experimental Prosthetic Surgery to Help One Dog Get a Leg Up,” Scientific American, August 2008
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fusing-metal-and-bone
 
“The Year of Sequencing,” special feature in Nature Methods, January 2008
http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v5/n1/full/nmeth1154.html

“Experts Slam NIH Study on Chelation Therapy,” Simons Foundation Web site, July 2008
http://sfari.org/news/experts-slam-nih-study-on-chelation-therapy

The Zoom In exhibit, Morehead Planetarium
http://www.moreheadplanetarium.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=page&filename=zoomin.html