Current Students

Class of 2013
Trent Knoss grew up just outside Minneapolis and studied English Literature at Boston University.  He has worked at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center (learning very curious things about very famous people), the Random House editorial department down under in Sydney (searching the slush pile for the next Great Australian Novel), and most recently, The Perseus Books Group, where he secured non-fiction excerpts in high-profile national magazines.

After years of reading science writing and enthusiastically discussing it with anyone who would listen, Trent realized that this was the perfect way to combine his love of a good narrative with his fascination about the way the world works.  He is thrilled to join the creative community at MIT and report on the life sciences (ecology, evolutionary biology, and zoology in particular).  He volunteers at the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, travels as often as he can get away with, seeks out obscure foreign films on purpose, and can be found running long distances along the Charles River in all weather, all seasons.

Class of 2013
Alison was raised in the suburbs of the Twin Cities and graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in biology.  She worked as a pharmacy technician before joining The HistoryMakers as project director of its National Science Foundation informal science education grant.  In this position, she had the opportunity to expose the public to the achievements of African American scientists through archival video, curriculum, and science center programs.  She is usually that person at the party who wants to talk about her favorite noble gas (Argon).  While at MIT, she produced and starred in a Science News Quiz show (https://soundcloud.com/#abruzek/science-news-quiz-at-mit).

Class of 2013
Erin’s interest in science shines through the lens of her relationship to her home—the historic and biologically-rich South Carolina Lowcountry. Her quest to understand the breadth and shape of the South’s native landscapes has led her to take jobs with an aquarium, a public power utility, a climate change research team, an urban farm, and multiple environmental nonprofits. Through work and research, Erin has traveled to unsung, rural corners of the region, handling alligators, rebuilding oyster beds, and eating a lot of good cooking along the way. She graduated from the University of South Carolina with degrees in English literature and ecology and a research emphasis in the flora and fauna of longleaf pine forests. Maligned reptiles and questions of natural history, ecosystem ecology, and small-scale agriculture are the most frequent subjects of her writing. Attending the Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT has been a dream of hers for more than half a decade.

Class of 2013
Aviva Hope Rutkin is a Long Island native whose interest in science was first sparked during long childhood afternoons at her mother’s veterinary hospital. She studied neuroscience and Chinese at Union College in New York, and spent her free time playing rugby, programming computer games, and manning the helm of her college newspaper for two difficult, wonderful years. Before settling upon a career in science communication, she worked a number of odd jobs, including Segway tour guide, robot camp assistant, tennis instructor, and country fair booth girl. She has also interned at Nature Publishing Group and Time, and will spend this summer writing about research at Brookhaven Laboratory. Her greatest accomplishment to date is winning a seashell identification contest in the Galápagos when she was sixteen. Keep up with Aviva on Twitter @avivahoperutkin.

Class of 2013
Leslie Baehr’s foray into writing was traumatically halted at the age of seven when her older brother read her diary. Eleven years later she attended the University of Colorado graduating with a degree in Environmental Science and Anthropology. After realizing that being far from the water was a horrendous idea, she spent some time exploring earth’s more watery bits, repeatedly landing in the Caribbean. This quest eventually brought her back to her native southern California where she has spent time in underwater kelp forest monitoring, marine and terrestrial research education, and sailboat racing. She returned to writing after realizing that talking to oneself is strange whereas writing is, more or less, a socially acceptable alternative. She is excited to join the MIT team and promises (to try) not to be a wimp about winter. She is currently traveling around the sun with no intentions of stopping any time soon.

Class of 2013
Sarah has two great loves in life: writing and bugs. Some of her earliest memories involve flipping over cinderblocks to find scorpions and spinning outrageous yarns, both of which got her into trouble more than once. Years later, she graduated from Dartmouth College with a dual degree in Creative Writing and Ecology, having completed a research stint in Costa Rica and written a honors thesis of short stories. She also indulged in her affection for pretty things at Dartmouth by working in the Claflin
Jewelry Studio and creating a senior collection of lampwork glass jewelry. Since then, she has worked in an environmental center, identifying and curating various entomological specimens with a focus on syrphid flies and writing fiction in her spare time. She splits her time between her two hometowns of Shanghai, China and a small, significantly Amish town in Western Pennsylvania.

Class of 2013
Hannah Cheng was composing silly little poems about the (literal) birds and bees at the age of six. However, after many years of practice and proper instruction from true gurus of the art, she began to feel burnt out and uninspired by pure academics. She decided to minor in environmental science on a whim and found that catching and identifying aquatic insects was an entirely fun and rejuvenating break from hunching over the computer keyboard. Obsessing over the mating habits of leopard slugs and dragonflies rekindled her love for the natural world, and reading research papers sparked an interest in dedicating her writing skills to science. To get a handle on what the laboratory world felt like, she became a polysomnographic technician, gluing electrodes to people’s scalps and reading their brain waves. After spending a year processing raw data, she returned to the writing world, invigorated and in style, by practicing science writing in New Orleans.

Class of 2013
Zahra has spent the last two years working in Boston as a Science Technical Writer for the catastrophe modeling company AIR Worldwide. At AIR, she wrote about the risk and damage associated with natural hazards—earthquakes, tropical cyclones, thunderstorms, winter storms and wildfires. Previously, Zahra studied impact craters on Mars, mapped active lava flows in Hawaii, and traveled and volunteered in her father’s homeland, Tanzania. She has a degree in Geology from Brown University, and has written for the Bulletin of the Global Volcanism Network, Discovery News, EARTH Magazine, and Volcano Watch. Apart from science writing, she has grand aspirations of world domination, voyaging to the moon George Méliès-style, and visiting (perhaps even climbing) all the major volcanoes on Earth. So far she has only made progress on the latter goal, and has already crossed off her master volcano list Hawaii’s Kilauea, Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro, and Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull.

Follow her escapades on Twitter @zhirji28.

Class of 2013
Abdul-Kareem Ahmed grew up in a suburb in Rhode Island. Seeking adventure, he attended college in the city, at the University of Pittsburgh. There he majored in Neuroscience and History & Philosophy of Science, discovering a curiosity, the human brain.

During college, Abdul spent some years studying the neural basis of motion sickness, as well as the neurophilosophy of color perception. He would soon find he wanted to share his interest in science. Abdul started writing for his college newspaper, The Pitt News, sharing opinions on research, health care and medicine. He also started The Pitt Pulse, a student publication that offers advice on pre-health and science career development.

Abdul’s ultimate goal is a career in medicine. For him, science writing serves as a voice of perspective in the science and medical community. One day he hopes to practice medicine and share his fascination through the craft of writing.