About
Christina Mackenzie has been a journalist for more decades than she cares to count. She started writing military tech stories for PopSci in 2019 after more than 20 years of covering the European defense and aerospace industries. She lives about 50 miles south of Paris with her husband in a house that seems a little too big now that their four kids have flown the nest.
Experience
After working as the European Parliament reporter for AP in Brussels and then on the English Desk for AFP in Paris, Christina discovered the defense world when she began working for Defense News as a freelance reporter covering France, Spain, the European Union, and NATO. She then took a staff job as the European Editor for Flight International before holding the same job for almost a decade with Defense Technology International (DTI, part of the Aviation Week & Space Technology group owned by McGraw Hill at the time).
She later edited a website specialized in land forces. In 2018, she launched her own website, Wombat: Women in Combat which, as its name suggests, puts the spotlight on women who work in the defense sector, either in the military or broader industry. For PopSci she likes discovering and explaining the new and sometimes quirky inventions that help the men and women in the defense sector do their jobs.
Education
Christina is an alumna of the French Institute of Higher Studies in National Defense (IHEDN, the equivalent of the National College of the Armed Forces at the National Defense University in Washington DC). She was a Fulbright Scholar at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she obtained an MS in Journalism. Prior to that she was an auditor at the Paris Institute of Political Science and earned her undergraduate MA in Hispanic Languages and Literature from the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Highlights
- A war-college alumna
- Can cut through techno- and military-speak to discover the real meaning underneath
- Has written for NATO, European Space Agency, European Civil Aviation Authority, British Army, Royal Navy and French Defense Ministry publications as well as the Financial Times, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Chemical Week and others.
Favorite weird science fact
That submarines are even a thing.
