I am delighted to announce that Carolyn Y. Johnson of The Washington Post will be joining The Times as a science reporter. Carolyn caught the science bug in high school, spending her summers working in molecular biology, materials science and physics labs (“lots of pipettes and lasers,” she says), before majoring in physics and English at Amherst College. After college, she did the science writing master’s program at MIT and then started at The Globe in 2004. By 2008, she had become their lead science reporter, and eventually was part of a team that covered a gruesome scientific detective story — a fungal meningitis outbreak that killed dozens of people — that was a Pulitzer finalist. Since 2020, she has been based in Boulder, Colorado, which is a hub for science research and also offers easy travel access to the western half of the country.