In 1985, clutching a brand-new Oxford doctorate, Sue Halpern went to work at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons teaching case-based ethics and social medicine.  Nearly twenty years later, the author of Four Wings and a Prayer  (now an award-winning documentary film ) and the New York Times notable book,  Migrations to Solitude, returned to Columbia in the company of a brilliant young neurologist, Scott Small, who guided her into the world of cutting-edge neuroscience.  Halpern, a former Rhodes Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and the director of the non-profit Face of Democracy project which teaches documentary journalism to high school students.  In addition to her  three books of non-fiction, she is the author of two novels, The Book of Hard Things and Introducing Sasha Abramowitz. She lives in Vermont and the Adirondacks with her husband Bill McKibben and their daughter Sophie, the editor of Bookworm Magazine