Since joining the magazine in 1986, TIME Senior Writer Michael Lemonick has written more than 40 cover stories on topics ranging from the Exxon Valdez oil spill to emerging viruses to the McCaughey septuplets. He has served as the backup writer for the Personal TIME health column, and wrote a number of Personal TIME family columns.

In 2002, Lemonick along with two other colleagues won First Place in the Overseas Press Club of America's Whitman Bassow Award for the best reporting in any medium on international environmental issues for their "Global Warming" cover package (April 9, 2001).

He is the author of three books on astronomy, The Light at the Edge of the Universe: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Cosmology (Villard Books, 1993), Other Worlds: The Search for Life in the Universe (Simon & Schuster, 1998) and Echo of the Big Bang (Princeton University Press, 2003).

Lemonick came to TIME from Science Digest magazine, where he was a senior editor. and has contributed as a freelance writer to Audubon, Discover, The Washington Post, People and Playboy. He has also appeared as a guest on Charlie Rose, Good Morning America and many other television and radio programs.

He received his BA from Harvard College in 1975, and a Master of Science in Journalism from Columbia University in 1983. He is a two-time winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science writing award, and the winner of the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award.