Brian Gallagher

I’m a writer, editor, and communications professional living in Berkeley. For more than ten years I was an editor at Nautilus, the science and culture magazine, where I commissioned and edited work that later appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Writing on Mathematics. My own journalism has been recognized by The New Yorker and others.

My first book, Are We Ready for Mars?, written with biomedical engineer Mark Shelhamer, will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in October 2026. It is about the science and systems of traveling to the Red Planet — the unglamorous, essential work of keeping a crew alive far from home.

I studied philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received a graduate degree from the Columbia Journalism School. The questions that have followed me from one desk to the next happily haven't changed: how minds make sense of the world, how science becomes culture, and what we owe one another once we know more than we used to.

I am launching Sense Data, a newsletter on ideas and culture and the stories those two things make.