Susan M. Gaines (’99, ’01) is the author of the novels Accidentals and Carbon Dreams, and of the non-fiction science book Echoes of Life. Her stories and essays have appeared in many magazines and anthologies—Nature, Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, North American Review, and The Best of the West IV, among others—and received two Pushcart Prize nominations. Gaines’s writing about science has been recognized by the Suffrage Science Award in London and by a Fellowship at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study in Germany. Currently, she divides her time between northern California and northern Germany, where she founded the international Fiction Meets Science fellowship and research program.