Sarah Dry is an historian of science and writer. Her most recent book, Waters of the World: The Story of the Scientists Who Unravelled the Mysteries of our Seas, Glaciers and Atmosphere–and Made the Planet Whole (Scribe UK/University of Chicago) is a history of the idea of global climate told in six scientific lives. It has been described as ‘remarkable (Ruth Morgan, Nature), ‘immensely readable’ (Jenny Uglow, TLS) and ‘one of the most beautifully written books on science that I have seen in a long time (Philip Ball, Author of H₂O).

Her books have been translated into Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean and reviewed in the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, Nature, Science, the Times Literary Supplement, Physics Today and the Literary Review.

She has been a researcher at the London School of Economics, the Institute for Development Studies and the University of Cambridge.

She is currently writing two books. One is a history of systems thinking and global problems, focussing on the life and work of Dana Meadows. It is titled The Woman Who Took on the World: Dana Meadows, the Limits to Growth, and the Invention of Systems Thinking and is under contract with Princeton University Press. The other, co-written with Mike Hulme, is a history of global average temperature, titled When Temperature Became Global: A Brief History of the World’s Most Important Index, also under contract with Princeton University Press.

She grew up in Philadelphia and lives in Oxford.