Ingrid Wickelgren

Features Editor
Spectrum

Ingrid Wickelgren edits Deep Dives, Spectrum’s long-form stories on important topics in autism research.

Before joining the foundation in 2015, Ingrid was senior editor at Scientific American Mind and wrote the Streams of Consciousness blog for ScientificAmerican.com. She has also authored three popular science books and has written for Science, Discover, Health and The New York Times.

Ingrid has a B.S. in biological sciences from Stanford University.

From this contributor

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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