Current Students

Class of 2012
Stephen Craft, 33, is a resident of Denver, Colorado. He received his B.S. in computer science from Metropolitan State College of Denver, with minors in mathematics and journalism. While focused primarily on technology, his interests also include geology, cosmology, particle physics, and the history of science. His favorite punctuation mark is the semicolon, and his favorite element is molybdenum.

Stephen was the picture of indecision most of his life, unable to choose between his passion for writing and his obsession with science. An amateur paleontologist at age eight, by 16 he was spending his days writing computer programs and his nights writing very bad science fiction. Only in college did he learn that his two loves weren’t mutually exclusive, that there were actually people out there who wrote about science for a living. He is thrilled to have the opportunity to try his hand at this unique and vital craft.

Class of 2012
Lauren started out studying psychology and zoology at the University of Florida, where she graduated cum laude in 2007. Since then, she’s interned at two zoos, briefly studied the neuroscience of music, and completed a master’s degree in psychology at Florida Atlantic University, where she studied people’s perceptions of the mental lives of animals. Her interests are varied, but all focus on interactions: cross-disciplinary research, human-animal and human-machine interactions, the interplay of science and religion, and the relationship of science to science fiction. In her spare time, she plays piano, dabbles in fiction writing, and follows the goings-on of the film industry. She also studies languages (natural and artificial) as a hobby, and is mildly obsessed with Doctor Who.

Class of 2012
Conor Myhrvold was born in Seattle, Washington. He recently graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in Geosciences. He is a big fan of animals, analogies, and his twin brother Cameron, who was his roommate last year and will remain a stone’s throw away at Harvard.

Class of 2012
Abby McBride grew up in New England and studied biology at Williams College. After graduating, she spent five years as an itinerant ecologist, freelance artist, and science communicator. She backpacked across the Iberian Peninsula and birded through the western United States. Living on the Maine coast, she manned the helm of a lobster boat and led ecology hikes in Acadia National Park. She spent a few months studying seabirds on an uninhabited Galapagos island, followed by another few months exploring Andean cloud forests. Most recently, Abby has been researching species invasion for Mount Holyoke College while moonlighting as a pastry chef. She is excited to combine many of her interests through the pursuit of science writing.

Class of 2012
Taylor is a writer mostly interested in people and the stuff in their skulls. In college he studied neuroscience and psychology, wrote fiction and journalism, learned French and lived six months in Paris and Bourgogne. After doing a brain-imaging experiment on the neural basis of reading for his thesis at Princeton, Taylor got wanderlustily tired of lab work. On a fellowship from the Princeton In Asia foundation, he taught English for two years in rural Yakage, Japan. He learned Japanese and did translation and editing for a neuroinformatics lab at ATR Telecommunications Insitute in Kyoto whose focus is on “neural decoding”— predicting thoughts from brain activity. Taylor spent a year at the Kyoto lab, working to decode dream content from brain activity during sleep. Taylor realized after this last adventure that his passion for science is more for story than data-mining, and decided to leave academia to become a writer. His dream is to write stories about people—from emotions to behaviors to brains to global cultures.

Class of 2012
Garret Fitzpatrick grew up just outside Chicago and once dreamed of being a professional wrestler and fisherman before realizing that professional wrestling was fake and fishermen slept on boats. Heartbroken, he redirected his passion towards the dream of spaceflight, finishing his Bachelors in Engineering Mechanics and Astronautics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May 2007.

Garret has served NASA at the Johnson Space Center as an engineer, manager, test dummy and strategic communications / public outreach advocate since he began working as a co-op student in 2003. Most of his technical work has been in the field of launch/entry pressure suits and emergency survival equipment for the Space Shuttle and Station programs.

Passionate about exploration and public service, his writing experience comes mainly from part-time blogging for NASA’s Open Government Initiative. He has lived and studied in Ireland and Russia, thinks space is still cool and hopes more people he meets on airplanes will agree with him in the future.

Class of 2012
Hannah recently graduated with degrees in biology and philosophy from Stanford University. She wet her science writing feet as a senior producer for a college documentary radio program, and had her audio work featured on KUOW Presents. She broadened her interest in writing for science multimedia during her research internship at WGBH’s NOVA, where she wrote articles whose topics ranged from neurons color coded by viruses to spitting venomous cobras. When not writing or editing audio, Hannah can most often be found captivated by video recordings of octopi or playing her ukulele.

Class of 2012
Fangfei Shen graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011 with an S.B. in physics and writing. She has received honors for her performance in physics, her service to the MIT physics department, and, of course, her writing. Her decision to attend MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing reflects not only desire to pursue a career in science writing but also a desire to remain at one of the most creative and innovative places in the world.

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).

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.