Rosie is well trained (PhD from Stanford, post-docs at Harvard and Johns Hopkins), though not always well behaved. Since 2006 she’s been writing openly about her day-to-day research on her RRResearch blog, whose tagline reads “Not your typical science blog, but an ‘open science’ research blog. Watch me fumbling my way towards understanding how and why bacteria take up DNA, and getting distracted by other cool questions.”
In 2011 she achieved her 15 minutes of fame by critiquing (on RRResearch) the NASA-sponsored paper claiming that bacteria could construct DNA using arsenic instead of phosphorus, and in 2012 she led a team that showed this work to not be reproducible. Lately she’s been criticizing the current teaching of genetics, and putting her money where her mouth is by developing and teaching the Useful Genetics MOOC on Coursera.