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Jennifer Ackerman is the author of Achoo! The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold (Twelve, 2010), among other books, including: Notes from the Shore; Chance in theHouse of Fate: A Natural History of Heredity; and Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body, which explores the biological events we experience over the course of a day. She has written for National Geographic, the New York Times, and other publications, and her work has been collected in several anthologies. As a journalist, she has interviewed a chimpanzee, chased a hurricane, crossed the Pacific to study the effects of global warming, and searched for dinosaur fossils in a remote province of western China. She is also a senior fellow at the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University.

She has served on the editorial board of the University of Virginia Press; was a judge for the Phillip D. Reed Memorial Prize for Environmental Writing, sponsored by the Southern Environmental Law Center; has served as an editorial consultant for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute on a series of magazines designed to introduce the general reader to new research in genetics, as well as for the Tufts University School of Nutrition Science and Policy, the Nature Conservancy, and the W. Alton Jones Foundation. She has lectured at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Virginia and its Medical Center, the American Association of University Women, and for numerous other groups and organizations.

For seven years Ackerman was a staff writer and researcher for the book division of the National Geographic Society, where she contributed to The Incredible Machine, a book about the human body (1986, 1992) and served as editor-in-chief of The Curious Naturalist, a collection of essays about approaching and understanding North American ecosystems (1991).