Abigail Foerstner teaches science writing and news writing in the graduate program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She is the author of Picturing Utopia: Bertha Shambaugh and the Amana Photographers (Iowa, 2000) and of hundreds of articles on science, history, and the visual arts. As a staff reporter for the suburban sections of the Chicago Tribune, she covered science and the environment for nearly ten years. She spent seven years researching and writing James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles.