Emily Singer.

Emily Singer

Chief opinion editor
The Transmitter

Emily Singer commissions and edits scientist-written content and develops new resources for the community. She joined The Transmitter in 2023 and has previously held a variety of editorial roles at the Simons Foundation, including editor for neuroscience collaborations, and senior biology writer and contributing editor at Quanta Magazine. Before joining the foundation, she was biomedical editor at Technology Review.

Education

  • Certificate in science communication, University of California, Santa Cruz
  • B.A. in biology, University of California, Santa Cruz

Fellowships

  • AAAS Mass Media Fellowship

Explore more from The Transmitter

Illustration of waterfall inside a woman's brain.

Revisiting the neural correlates of consciousness

Life happens in real time, but experience may be composed in ragtime—like the music genre, full of offbeat notes and uneven rhythms. The assumption that waking life consists of a “stream” of conscious representations has inadvertently led consciousness science to its current impasse.

By Francis T. Fallon, Michael Pitts
28 September 2026 | 7 min read
Illustration of rolling dice.

Grant review needs reform. How about we add an element of chance?

A process that uses a lottery system saves time, reduces strategic resubmission and accepts that, above a quality threshold, luck has always played a part in science funding.

By Adrien Peyrache
25 September 2026 | 6 min read
Research diagram of gene expression.

Fly neurons carry molecular signatures of their origins

The pattern of transcription factors a Drosophila neuron expresses offers clues to its lineage and birth order—and ultimately how neural circuits emerge.

By Alissa de Chassey
25 September 2026 | 5 min read