Janna Levin researches the early universe, chaos and black holes. Her second book, a novel called A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (Knopf 2006), won the PEN/Bingham Fellowship for Writers that honors debut fiction. She is also the author of the popular science book How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space.

Levin is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. She has worked at the Center for Particle Astrophysics (CfPA) at the University of California, Berkeley before moving to the UK where she worked at Cambridge University in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). Just before returning to New York, she was the first scientist-in-residence at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing at Oxford with an award from the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and Arts. She has written for many artists.