Hope Jahren is a successful American professor, geobiologist, and geochemist. With these credentials, she penned her memoir Lab Girl, which focuses on the overlooked brilliance of plant life and nature. The book is divided into five parts: a prologue, an epilogue, and three-segmented chapters in between. Jahren discusses her revelations using scientific discovery and redefining what it means to be a scientist.
Jahren makes it clear that although we may not all have the background she does when it comes to scientific discovery, we are able to become more educated through her work. This is what made her book so well-received by critics as ten publications added it to their Best Book of the Year list, including Entertainment Weekly and The Washington Post. Jahren also received a number of prestigious awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award in the autobiography category.
Jahren is best known for her work in analyzing fossil forests that date back to the Eocene, which was approximately fifty million years ago. Her work revolves around isotope analysis, which enables her to reconstruct the climate and environmental conditions of the past, revealing such things as what animals ate, what humans ate, and how the flora and fauna of the time contributed to the survival of both. Jahren is the recipient of the James B. Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union and is currently a professor of geobiology at the University of Oslo in Norway.
