Melissa Hendricks Joyce

At Johns Hopkins, Melissa Hendricks is the Program Director of the MA in Science Writing program.

Hendricks has taught at Johns Hopkins University for more than 15 years and oversaw the transition of the program from an onsite to an online/low-residency format.

She has written extensively about biomedical research and public health for publications that endeavor to communicate science broadly. She was the Senior Science Writer for Johns Hopkins Magazine for 12 years. Her articles have also appeared in New Scientist, National Geographic, The Los Angeles Times, Science News, Ladies’ Home Journal, AARP The Magazine, Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine, USA Weekend, and National Parks magazine, among other publications. She has received writing awards from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the American College of Emergency Physicians. In 2010, she received the MA in Writing Program’s Award for Teaching Excellence.

Hendricks has led several science writing residency courses: In 2012, she took a group of students to the Bar Harbor/Acadia National Park area in Maine for “In the Field,” which focused on coastal research and field biology. In 2013, Hendricks directed a week-long “Medicine in Action” course, which exposed students to the front lines of medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital. In 2014, she was the primary instructor for “Science Policy, Funding, and Politics” in Washington, D.C., where students visited and met with officials on Capitol Hill and with the National Institutes of Health, the National Academy of Sciences, and the White House. She taught the 2017 “Science in Action” residency, highlighting federal research labs, and in 2018, she led the program’s first overseas course, the Dublin-based “Marine Science & Science Writing on the Emerald Isle.” Hendricks also regularly teaches the program’s two core courses, as well as Thesis & Careers in Science Writing.

After earning a BA in Biology from Wesleyan University, she worked in research laboratories at Tufts University School of Medicine and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Pivoting from research to writing, she then completed the Science Communication program at the University of California Santa Cruz. Hendricks has also earned a Master of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University.