| The author, Alison Davis, was a student in the Science
Communication program at the University of California at Santa Cruz when
she wrote this article for Science Notes. In her former life, she was a
scientist. Then Alison Dobrenski, she obtained a B.S. in iochemistry from
Virginia Tech in 1988. She earned a Ph.D. in pharmacology from Georgetown
University in 1993, after studying leukemia cell maturation for a couple
of years and writing a 270-page document about it. In a period of three
months, she defended her graduate thesis, got married and moved to the West
Coast -- the last being the biggest life-change of the lot. Sporting a new
name, Alison Davis then did a post-doctoral fellowship in developmental
biology at Stanford University, where she studied a tiny pocket of science
called mitochondrial DNA replication. Now she is a full-time writer and
mom and loves each minute of it. Her first child, Andrew, was born in July,
1996, enforcing the realization that a full day meant many more hours than
it used to. She enjoys cooking, travel, camping and a good laugh. Alison's
work has been published in Popular Science, the Palo Alto Weekly, and several
Stanford University publications, including The Stanford Daily, Stanford
Report, and Stanford Medicine. |
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