Alison Takemura

Alison loves wading into a good science story. Her first was her MIT doctoral thesis project, unlocking the gastronomical genome of a Vibrio bacterium. For some of the Vibrio’s meals, she collected seaweed from the rocky, Atlantic coastline at low tide. (Occasionally, its waves swept her off her feet.) During grad school, Alison was also a fellow in MIT’s Biological Engineering Communication Lab. Helping students share their science with their instructors and peers, she began to crave the ability to tell the stories of other scientists, and the marvels they discover, to a broader audience. So after graduating in 2015 with a microbiology doctorate, she trekked to the Pacific coast to study science communication at the University of California, Santa Cruz. There, she learned how to interview people, write feature stories, create podcasts, shoot videos, and finally, drive. Her stories were about pesticide residues in children, HIV in South Africa, rainforests in Australia, calorie-burning brown fat, and what hide behind Jupiter’s clouds. Alison graduated in 2016, and like a homing pigeon, migrated back to MIT.