Animal Madness (Braitman)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Ventura, California, USA
• Education— B.A. Cornell University; Ph.D., MIT
• Awards—TED fellowship
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California


Laurel Braitman is a science historian, writer, and a TED Fellow. She was born and raised on a citrus ranch in Southern California where she was surrounded, as she says on her website, by "a small herd of donkeys, two parrots, a series of sickly hamsters, three dogs, a bunch of barn cats that didn’t like me, a rabbit named Violetta, an armored catfish named Harold, and a tarantula."

Braitman received her B.A. from Cornell University in biology and writing. She earned her Ph.D. in the history of science from MIT. In addition to her TED fellowship, she is an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts and frequently collaborates with musicians and visual artists.

Her book Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves was published in 2014. She has also written for Pop Up Magazine, The New Inquiry, Salon, and a variety of other publications.  (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/19/2014.)