Brooke Magnanti

Brooke Magnanti, one of Observers Faces of 2009 and Guardian newspaper's Best British Weblog 2003, is a scientist and author. She is writer of the bestselling Belle de Jour series of books, which were adapted into the hit ITV show "Secret Diary of a Call Girl" starring Billie Piper. She is also the writer of The Sex Myth.

Brooke has been featured by more than 100 media outlets including the Sunday Times, Independent, New Scientist, Grazia, The Scotsman, HardTalk, Sky News, This Week and Newsnight. She is a columnist for the Telegraph's Wonder Women, former science editor of Cliterati, and has contributed pieces to the Guardian, Big Issue, and Town. Brooke was featured in an episode of Stephen Fry's Planet Word and is a popular public speaker on the themes of biometric and forensic science, sexualisation and popular culture, and internet anonymity and identity.

Brooke was born in west central Florida in 1975. She was a National Merit Scholar and received a B.Sc. from Florida State University in 1996, where she studied in the Anthropology and Mathematics departments. She later studied for a master's in Genetic Epidemiology at the University of Sheffield in England, and earned a Ph.D. in the Forensic Pathology department there, specialising in human decomposition and postmortem identification. She has worked in forensic science, epidemiology, chemoinformatics and cancer research. Brooke currently lives in rural NW Scotland with her husband.