Thomas Hayden teaches writing, communication and environmental sustainability through the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER ) in the School of Earth Sciences. He also teaches COMM 177C/277C, a specialized reporting and writing course in environmental journalism, and is affiliated with the Woods Institute for the Environment.

Hayden’s journalism career began at Newsweek magazine in New York, where he started as an American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow in 1997. In 2000, he moved to US News & World Report in Washington, DC, where he covered science, the environment, medicine, culture and breaking news as a senior writer. Since 2005, Hayden has been a freelance journalist, writing for publications including National Geographic, Smithsonian, USA Today and the Washington Post Book World. He has reported from South America, Europe and Asia, and from New Orleans to the Canadian Arctic.

Hayden is coauthor of two books. He wrote the 2007 national bestseller On Call in Hell, about battlefield medicine in Iraq, with Navy doctor Richard Jadick. In 2008 he collaborated on Sex and War, about the biological evolution and cultural development of warfare through human history, with Malcolm Potts of the University of California, Berkeley.

In 2005, Hayden taught science writing in The Writing Workshops at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore with his wife and fellow science journalist, Erika Check Hayden. He has been a faculty member in the annual Banff Centre Science Communications workshop since its inception in 2006, and has been involved as a speaker and trainer with the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program for environmental scientists since 2000.

Hayden graduated from the University of Saskatchewan with a Bachelor of science in Agriculture (honours) degree in applied microbiology and food science, and received an MS in marine biology from the University of Southern California. He completed five successful years of doctoral study in biological oceanography at USC, before leaving science for journalism. He spent more than nine months at sea in all, conducting oceanographic research from Southern California to San Francisco Bay, and from Antarctica to Easter Island.