Ashley Hamer is a science communicator with a wide range of specialties and a deep love of the unknown. She is the managing editor at Descript, an AI-powered audio and video editing app, the former cohost of the award-winning Curiosity Daily podcast, and a freelance scriptwriter for several science-based YouTube channels. Ashley’s writing has appeared in Cosmopolitan, TIME, Buzzfeed, Mashable, and USA Today.

A Northern California native, she began her editorial career in Chicago in 2010 after earning a master’s degree in jazz saxophone at the University of North Texas. A love of science blossomed while she was in music school, and by the time she had graduated, that love had grown into an urgent need to learn as much as she could about the universe and share that knowledge with the world. Shortly after starting a freelance music career in Chicago, she worked as a staff writer for Groupon while spending her off-time blogging about the intersections between music and science for Mad Art Lab and cohosting and editing its podcast, Mad Art Cast. She also served as a board member of Women Thinking Inc., a nonprofit devoted to promoting science to women and families, and earned a certificate in medical writing from the University of Chicago.

Ashley began a full-time science writing career at Curiosity in 2016, and the rest is history. Since then, she has interviewed the likes of Sean Carroll, Carl Zimmer, and Alan Alda, hosted a number of widely viewed science videos, appeared on several leading science podcasts, and spoken on stages everywhere from C2E2 and New York Comic Con to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C. and Seattle, Washington.

In 2019, Curiosity was acquired by Discovery, Inc., the media company behind informative, educational TV channels and digital products that include the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, The Science Channel, Seeker, and more.

When she’s not exploring the universe’s big questions, Ashley can be found performing a wide variety of music in and around Asheville, North Carolina. Ashley is also a Boston-qualified marathon runner, a triathlete, a cat mom, and — just recently — a real mom.