Robert I. Katz is a Professor of Clinical Anesthesiology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He was born and raised on Long Island, where he developed a love for reading at a young age. Katz attended Columbia College, where he received his undergraduate degree in English in 1974. After graduation, he decided to pursue a career in medicine and attended Northwestern University Medical School. It was during his time at Northwestern that Katz developed a love for deep dish pizza, a passion that he still carries with him today.
After completing his medical degree, Katz went on to do his residency in Anesthesiology at Columbia Presbyterian. He spent the majority of his career at Stony Brook, where he ultimately achieved the academic rank of Professor and Vice-Chairman for Administration in the Department of Anesthesiology. Despite his busy career in medicine, Katz always had a desire to write. He began writing around 1985, using his personal computer to produce his work. After many years of practice, Katz finally published his first novel, Edward Maret: A Novel of the Future, in 2001. The novel received excellent reviews and won the ASA Literary Prize for 2001.
Following the success of his first novel, Katz went on to write a series of mysteries, including Surgical Risk, The Anatomy Lesson, and Seizure. These novels have been compared favorably to the works of Patricia Cornwell and Robin Cook, and have received positive reviews from a number of publications. In 2014, Katz published a science fiction short story, "To the Ends of the Earth in the Deep Blue Sea," on Kindle for Amazon. He has since made all of his previously published novels available for purchase on Kindle. In June 2017, Katz began a new venture, publishing new novels on Kindle, starting with The Cannibal’s Feast, a science fiction story of corporate warfare in space. The next novel, coming out in early 2018, is another science fiction novel titled The City of Dust, a tale set on an abandoned world after the collapse of the First Interstellar Empire of Mankind.