Jon Farrow

Editorial

There’s nothing quite like the written word when it comes to getting your point across.

Blogs and articles

This is my bread and butter.

Over the last ten years, I’ve crafted articles on everything from quantum supremacy and fungal arms races to malaria milestones, sequencing technologies, and mosquito identification.

Here are a few of my favourite pieces:

  • A Quantum Festschrift for David Poulin, CIFAR, June 2020. This one meant a lot because it involved compiling memories from close friends and collaborators for a great scientist who sadly passed away a few weeks later.
  • A beginner’s guide to mosquito identification, Sanger Institute, August 2023. Based on a Twitter thread I posted from MalariaGEN in 2022, this quickly rose to become the top-performing blog on the Sanger site. Month after month, it remains in the top spot because of how searchable it is.
  • Six women creating the future of malaria genomics, February 2023. In celebration of International Day of Women and Girls in STEM, I profiled six women from four different labs around the world, all leading on cutting-edge malaria research.

Op-Eds

My writing and editing skills have also been called upon to help sharpen an argument. With the right expert holding the pen, this can be an incredibly effective strategy for thought leadership.

For example, I worked on:

Infographics

Sometimes, the complexity of a process or an approach needs the clever combination of words and pictures. Enter: the infographic.

At ScienceUpFirst, we lived and breathed infographics. My job was to commission, shape, edit, and ultimately approve what we published.

Here are a few of my favourites:

Reports

At least once a year, most organizations compile all of their biggest successes and stories into one big document. Often it’s a legal requirement, but it’s also a great comms opportunity.

At CIFAR, I wrote much of the content (e.g. research summaries and impact stories) for annual reports in 2018, 2019, and 2020.