David Appell is a freelance science journalist living in New Hampshire. His work has appeared in Scientific American, Popular Science, Wired, Salon, Discover, New Scientist, Audubon, Technology Review, the Whitehead Institute, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, Nature, and many other outlets.

Appell has a B.S. in mathematics and physics from the University of New Mexico, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has done graduate work in the creative writing department at Arizona State University, and he has been a systems engineer at AT&T Bell Laboratories and MCI Communications; a business partner/software developer/"whatever-it-took" at a startup telecommunications software company, Gold Systems, Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; and an assistant editor of technology at Laser Focus World magazine.

Appel's short stories have appeared in The Seattle Review, Sycamore Review, Hawaii Review, InterText, and other publications.