Born May 25, 1961 in the Virginia port city of Norfolk, Andrew Lawler sold roses, worked as a dishwasher and did a stint in an Alaskan fish cannery before discovering journalism in 1984. As an associate editor at The Futurist, he learned the ropes of publishing and helped redesign the magazine. He then landed a job as a reporter for a space publication just days before the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster, and spent the next decade and a half covering Washington politics for a host of newsletters, newspapers, and magazines. He interviewed Vice President Dan Quayle on Air Force 2, Al Gore in his White House office, and President George Herbert Walker Bush on a trip to Houston. He also covered Congress, federal agencies, and advisory committees. During that time, Lawler founded Space Station News, helped launch the weekly newspaper Space News , and traveled widely around the world writing about space, science, and technology. After a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism fellow, he founded Science Magazine's New England bureau and began reporting frequently on archaeology in the Middle East, Central Asia, India, and China. His stories have appeared in more than a dozen publications, as well as in several volumes of the Best of American Science and Nature Writing. Lawler is now a contributing correspondent to Science Magazine and Archaeology Magazine.

Education: 1983 B.A. Interdisciplinary Studies with Highest Honors in Political Science, Anthropology, and Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Junior year study at Freiburg Universitaet, Germany

Books : The Space Station Directory. With James Vedda. 1987.