Geobiologist Hope Jahren has spent her life studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Lab Girl is her revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also a celebration of the lifelong curiosity, humility, and passion that drive every scientist. In these pages, Hope takes us back to her Minnesota childhood, where she spent hours in unfettered play in her father’s college laboratory. She tells us how she found a sanctuary in science, learning to perform lab work “with both the heart and the hands.” She introduces us to Bill, her brilliant, eccentric lab manager. And she extends the mantle of scientist to each one of her readers, inviting us to join her in observing and protecting our environment. Warm, luminous, compulsively readable, Lab Girl vividly demonstrates the mountains that we can move when love and work come together.

Hope Jahren was born and grew up in small-town southeastern Minnesota, just a few miles north of the Iowa border. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1996, and then took an Assistant Professor position at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 1999 she was hired by Johns Hopkins University and went on to become the first woman ever to be promoted with tenure within their Earth and Planetary Sciences Department (est. 1876). In 2008 she was hired to build the Isotope Geobiology Laboratories at the University of Hawaii. She is one of four scientists, and the only woman, to have been awarded both of the Young Investigator Medals given within the Earth Sciences. She has been the recipient of three Fulbright Awards and in 2005, Popular Science named her one of the "Brilliant 10" young scientists in the United States. She currently resides in Oslo, Norway with her husband, their son, and their Chesapeake Bay Retriever dog.