As the award-winning author of four books, and a veteran writer and editor for newspapers, magazines, and websites, Fran Hawthorne has spent her career exploring the intersection between business and social policy.

Back in 1985 she dug into the ways Wall Street buys business with campaign contributions, and she was one of the first to debunk the myth that socially responsible investing means lower profits. She has investigated diet drug fads, anti-aging “wonder” drugs, and the collapse of the American pension system.

Her books include: Inside the FDA: The Business and Politics Behind the Drugs We Take and the Food We Eat (John Wiley & Sons, 2005), Pension Dumping (Bloomberg Press, 2008), and The Overloaded Liberal: Shopping, Investing, Parenting, and Other Daily Dilemmas in an Age of Political Activism (Beacon Press, 2010).

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley, Hawthorne worked at Fortune, BusinessWeek, and the Record of Bergen County, N.J. She now writes regularly for The New York Times, Newsday, The Scientist, NY Journal of Books, and many other publications.

Ms. Hawthorne was also selected as a contributor in fiction at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont in 1991.