Before becoming a book author, Sandra Aamodt was the editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, a leading scientific journal in the field of brain research. She received her undergraduate degree in biophysics from the Johns Hopkins University and her doctorate in neuroscience from the University of Rochester. After postdoctoral research at Yale University, she joined Nature Neuroscience at its founding in 1998 and was editor in chief from 2003 to 2008. During her career at the journal, she read over four thousand neuroscience papers and wrote many editorials on neuroscience and science policy. Her science writing has also been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, El Mundo and The Times of London. She lives in Northern California with her husband, a cat, and three chickens.Her first book, Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life, was published in twenty-one languages. The American Association for the Advancement of Science named it their Young Adult Science Book of the Year. Welcome to Your Child's Brain: How the Mind Grows Itself from Conception to College was published in September 2011 by Bloomsbury US and is under contract with twelve international publishers to date.