Dana began her writing career when she landed a summer job working with bumble bees. She went on to study bees for her PhD in animal cognition—and was never stung. Her first book, The Beekeepers: How Humans Changed the World of Bumble Bees (Scholastic Focus), was longlisted for the The Nature Generation’s 2022 Green Earth Book Award. Animal Minds: What Are They Thinking? (Orca Book Publishers) was a Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s Best Book for Kids and Teens 2024. The Monarch Effect: Surviving Poison, Predators, and People (Scholastic Focus) was The Nature Generation’s Green Earth Book Award 2025 Recommended Reading, a Book of the Week pick of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, and a TIME Magazine’s Time for Kids Earth Day Read. Her first book for adult readers, The Honey Trap: How the Good Intentions of Urban Beekeepers Risk Ecological Disaster (Sutherland House Books), won the 2024 Science Writers and Communicators of Canada (SWCC) Paradigm Prize.

Dana has been a guest on a number of podcasts; an invited speaker to schools, meetings, lunch-and-learns, and conferences; and was selected as a touring author for the Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s Canadian Children’s Book Week 2025.

 

Dana’s nonfiction writing has also been published in Highlights for Children magazine and the Canadian Wildlife Federation’s WILD magazine. Dana lives with her family in Waterloo, Ontario.