About

 
 
 

Short Bio

Carolyn Combs is a former molecular biologist who now shares her passion for the natural world with children through her writing. She still loves doing research, but now does it at the library, online, and by speaking with scientists rather than researching in a lab. She has fond memories from her childhood of camping beside a noisy beaver dam and of visiting a local petting farm and waiting for the peacock to fan out his tail. These memories, along with her curiosity about animal communication, helped inspire her to write her first picture book, What’s This Tail Saying?. Carolyn lives in Colorado with her husband, son, cat, and poodle, who loves hiking and trick training as much as she does.

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My sister and me with our duck, Lucky. That’s me hugging Lucky.

More about Carolyn

She grew up in picturesque Peterborough, NH, surrounded by mountains.
She was the shy kid who:

  • Begged to be left at the Friendly Farm, where children could mingle with goats, sheep, pigs, and other farm animals.

  • Loved to be outdoors, playing pretend in the forest or by the beaver pond behind her house.

  • Experimented with grafting branches from one kind of tree onto another kind.

  • Was a bookworm - favorites included Blueberries for Sal and The Black Stallion series, wildlife magazines, and libraries.

  • Caught the horseback-riding bug and never recovered.

  • Dreamed of working with primates in Africa like Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, but was practical and studied molecular biology instead, earning a B.S. from Cornell and an M.S. from UMBC.

Now she lives in western Colorado, near the magnificent Rocky Mountains.
She’s a curious adult who:

  • Worked in laboratories at universities and companies on a wide range of projects from how the immune system might be prompted to fight cancer to how signals travel from the cell membrane to the nucleus.

  • Re-discovered a love of children’s books after she had her son.

  • Is thrilled to be marrying her love of children’s books with her passion for animals, research, and lively nonfiction writing.

  • Reads and thinks about animals’ inner lives, their thoughts and feelings, and how they communicate.

  • Married an entrepreneurial scientist from India, traveled there several times, and saw monkeys at temples, plus camels and cows on the streets of Bangalore.

  • Hopes to go on an African safari one day but appreciates the coyotes, bobcats, and all the other creatures in her backyard and strives to protect them and to share them with children.