Matt Brown

Matt grew up in the sleepy but smelly port of Grimsby, in the north-east of England. His formative years were spent reading Arthur C. Clarke and learning to distinguish individual space shuttles on the basis of their tiling patterns. Everyone wanted to be his friend.

Somewhere around the age of 18, he decided to swap the stench of fish for the more pleasant aromas of the chemistry laboratory, and headed up to the University of York. Three years of fiddling with tubes and columns led him to a Masters in molecular biology, also at York.

Matt's next move was to the eternal city of London, where he got a 'work experience' job as second understudy to the person who makes the tea at STM publisher Elsevier. With years of toil and graft, the likes of which only Victorian chimneysweeps could best, Matt worked his way to an editor's position on the review journal Current Opinion in Chemical Biology. Thus ensconced, he spent a very happy seven years mastering the arts of the red pen.

But everybody has two jobs these days, and Matt has been sneakily moonlighting as a writer for some time. He is a regular contributor to, and now editor of Londonist, one of the UK's most influential blogs and part of the Gothamist network. Here, he has written on everything from the city's graffiti culture to interviewing a man who collects discarded shopping lists. Matt also contributes regularly to TimeOut, and is co-author (under pseudonym - it's a long story) of the London Collection.

Today, he works at Nature, editing a local networking site for scientists: Nature Network London (launching February 2007). He would still enjoy making the tea for his office colleagues, but finds everyone drinks coffee these days.