Sharon Weinberger holds a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University, where she was elected to the prestigious honor society Phi Beta Kappa, and M.A.s from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs in International Affairs and from Yale University in Russian and East European Studies.

She has also worked as a defense analyst for System Planning Corporation (SPC), a research, electronics and computer software company working for the US DoD, where her work focussed on such areas as arms export policy, the Department of Defense laboratory system. Together with Dov S. Zakheim she co-authored a study for the think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies entitled Toward a Fortress Europe published in 2000.

She has written for Wired's national security blog, Danger Room. She was editor-in-chief of Defense Technology International, a monthly magazine published by the McGraw Hill Aviation Week Group. She has written on science and technology policy for periodicals such as Slate, the Financial Times and the Washington Post Magazine. Her first book, Imaginary Weapons, describes a dispute over a weapons concept based on nuclear isomers.

More recently she has written for both Foreign Policy and Slate on aspects of life in the Gaza strip.

She is married to fellow National security journalist, Nathan Hodge with whom she co-authored A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry in which they describe visits to current and past nuclear weapons sites and meetings with some of the people involved with nuclear weapons programmes.

During the Autumn of 2008 and Spring of 2009 she took a sabbatical to become a Knight Fellow in science journalism at MIT.