Thomas held the Knight Chair in Health and Medical Journalism at UGA before becoming a Professor Emerita. Having grown up in a small town in Central Florida, she was eager to go elsewhere for college and earned degrees from UC Berkeley and Stanford. For more than three decades she worked as a reporter and editor in the San Francisco Bay Area, Atlanta and Boston, specializing in science, health, and medicine. She was a science writing fellow at MIT, the editor of Harvard Medical School’s consumer newsletter, and a visiting scholar at Boston University. Pat realized during her year at BU that she wanted to teach writers to become better storytellers. By that time, she had written a narrative nonfiction book of her own: Big Shot: Passion, Politics, and the Struggle for an AIDS Vaccine was published in 2001 and named a Washington Post notable book.