Carol Featherstone (Science Publishing)

Carol Featherstone
Carol Featherstone

Carol Featherstone is currently a freelance science editor and writer, living and working in the south west of France near Toulouse. She has had a diverse career that has taken her from a PhD in biochemistry in the UK, through three postdocs in Germany and the USA, to a career in science publishing and, lately, into science policy, career development and training.

During her time as a postdoc in cell biology, she worked in three excellent research institutes: EMBL in Heidelberg; Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, and the Scripps Clinic in San Diego. Her work from this period is published in the Journal of Cell Biology, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

In 1990, at the age of 32, she was appointed as the first Editor of a new review journal, Trends in Cell Biology. She later went on to work as a freelance science journalist for the Lancet, Science, New Scientist and other scientific publications. Her combined experience as an editor and as a journalist stood her in good stead upon her move to France in 2000 to launch an online magazine, The ELSO Gazette, for the new European Life Scientist Organization (ELSO).

Working with ELSO for the past eight years, she has been involved in science policy discussions on behalf of ELSO concerning creation of the European Research Council and development of the European Union's Framework Programmes for research. She has also guided the evolution of ELSO's career development activities through its Career Development Committee.

She continues to work for ELSO in these capacities, as well as for other clients to improve manuscripts before submission, to write and edit English-language web content for French research institutes, and lately she is starting to train young scientists in presenting thier work to their peers in the form of posters, talks and manuscripts.

Approaching her 50th birthday, Carol is happily married to a French immunologist, with whom she has three teenage children.