Kanigel, Robert, 1946-

Robert Kanigel was born on May 28, 1946, in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Stuyvesant High School and received an engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1966. He worked as an engineer in Baltimore, Maryland, until 1969, when he quit his job to spend a year living in Paris and travelling Europe. During this year, Kanigel decided to become a writer. He lived in San Francisco from 1971 to 1974, before returning to Baltimore, where he wrote freelance until 1999, especially for Johns Hopkins Magazine and a variety of Jewish publications. His first published book was Apprentice to Genius (Macmillan, 1986), about the role of mentorship among scientists. After that, he transitioned to writing primarily long-form essays and monographs. Beginning in the 1980s, Kanigel taught writing classes, first in the evening school of Johns Hopkins University, then in the University of Baltimore's Yale Gordon College of Liberal Arts. In 1999, he accepted a position as professor of science writing at MIT, where he helped start its Graduate Program in Science Writing, which he directed for seven years. In 2011, Kanigel retired from MIT to write full time again, and moved back to Baltimore with his wife, Sarah.