Amy Rogers, MD, PhD, began her writing career in elementary school by (unsuccessfully) submitting anecdotes to Reader’s Digest in hopes of earning twenty-five bucks. By junior high her real passion was science, especially microbiology. In the bedroom of her home in rural southern Minnesota, she kept Petri dishes of bacteria in an egg incubator and won purple ribbons in science fairs. That passion led her to study biochemistry at Harvard, and ultimately to earn a doctorate in immunology. Wee beasties animated her years of teaching microbiology at the university level. More recently, micro-critters inspire her to write short stories that highlight their amazing powers, and novels that use real science and medicine to create plausible, frightening scenarios in the style of Michael Crichton.

Amy’s thrilling science-themed novels pose frightening “what if?” questions. Compelling characters and fictionalized science—not science fiction—make her books page-turners that seamlessly blend reality and imagination. Her debut novel Petroplague is about a biotechnology disaster in which oil-eating bacteria contaminate the fuel supply of Los Angeles and paralyze the city. She has since published Reversion, and The Han Agent, a multi-award winning novel.

Her nonfiction articles about science and engineering behind the scenes of everyday life first appeared in the Inside Arden newspaper and are now collected in her book Science in the Neighborhood. Amy is an Active member of International Thriller Writers, and serves as treasurer for Northern California Publishers and Authors.

Because of her long-term fascination with pandemics both fictional and real, in January of 2020 Amy started closely following all news about a new respiratory virus emerging in China. By the end of February, she wrote a treatise called THE COMING PANDEMIC that summarized what was known about SARS-CoV-2 at the time. In response to people’s hunger for calm, clear, accurate information, she started blogging about the coronavirus at her site AmyRogers.com.  Readers have described her work as “a voice of calm intelligence amidst a sea of noise”; “very informative”; a “valuable public service”; “understandable by an average lay person”; and “the best written piece so far–neither hysterical nor sugar-coated.”

She is a highly sought-after speaker who delivers thrilling lectures around the country. A member of International Thriller Writers, she served as a judge for ITW’s Thriller Awards and has twice been a panelist at ThrillerFest in New York; a panel moderator at Left Coast Crime; keynote speaker at the University of the Pacific Conference on Creative Writing, and elsewhere.

Relentlessly curious, she works for scientific literacy and nature education for kids.

This author loves dim sum, Ted Drewes, redwood forests, Minnesota lakes, Hawaiian beaches, and cats. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two exceptional children who believe she has an unreasonable tolerance for mysterious things growing in her refrigerator.

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