Maryn McKenna is a journalist and author who writes about public health, global health, medicine, and food policy, but it's OK with her if you just call her Scary Disease Girl, since almost everyone else does. She is the author of SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2010), an investigation of the global epidemic of drug-resistant staph, which received the 2011 Science in Society Award; and BEATING BACK THE DEVIL: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (FP/S&S, 2004), which recounts a year she spent embedded with the CDC's rapid-reaction force and which was named a Top Science Book by Amazon and an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association. She is a columnist for Scientific American and a senior fellow of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.