I live in Queens, New York with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist. I’m Russian-American & Jewish, by way of New York. I like to keep busy; when I’m not on a laptop, I’m biking, browsing for used books, baking something from SmittenKitchen with Faye.
Professionally, I’m somewhere between a researcher, communicator, producer, organizer, and strategist. I’m interested in science, technology, and society. When asked to neatly compartmentalize those interests, I can’t help but remember a poem I once heard by the late Lisel Mueller:
“What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
the fluid dream of the Thames?”
Since 2020, I’ve been working full-time at Ginkgo Bioworks, the worker-owned organism company, where I’m a Director in the Sociotechnical Studio, primarily focusing on communication and governance infrastructures.
Ginkgo’s mission is to make biology easier to engineer. We offer end-to-end capabilities and unparalleled scale to companies creating the next generation of medicines, foods, materials, and so much more. My role at Ginkgo involves supporting a wide variety of functions in our cell engineering business and across our public health and biosecurity effort, Concentric by Ginkgo, including creative (incl. text, audio, and video), policy, strategy, marketing, investor relations, internal communications, public and media relations, sales, science communication, and cultivating care for the use of our platform by building norms and mechanisms for worker ownership. As part of my responsibilities, I lead the writing and review of all corporate press releases and our engagements with media. I am a senior editor and a member of the publishing team at Grow by Ginkgo. I plan and co-host our regular Town Halls and all-hands meetings, represent my team in companywide strategy, produce our quarterly earnings calls, run our audiovisual studio, and develop companywide policy and infrastructure, including the establishment of cultural principles, major change management initiatives, and mechanisms like committee elections. I’m experienced in policy and crisis communication.
I’m committed to expanding worker ownership through education, and am a board member of the Sand Mountain Cooperative Education Center based in Alabama, and participate in the Aspen Business Roundtable on Organized Labor.
I’m pursuing a JD through the City University of New York’s School of Law’s evening program, with graduation expected in 2026 or 2027.
I also lead a project in collaboration with New York Times opinion senior editor James Ryerson and the psychologists Dave DeSteno and Lisa Feldman Barrett. Supported by several generous grants from the Sir John Templeton Foundation’s Public Engagement portfolio, we produce fully funded workshops, running through 2026 (called Beyond the Ivory Tower - contact me if you’re curious about applying!), media (including a podcast and a video series called Line Edit), and ongoing support designed for academics looking to write short pieces for wide audiences about big questions. You can see the 100+ pieces our alums have placed, many with support from me, here.
I have written pieces in outlets like Aeon and Elemental, and will be a member of the inaugural cohort of Ideas Matter fellows in 2024.
I’m passionate about how the ways in which we make media changes how we talk about ideas and facts. I have an ongoing relationship as a Research Fellow with Knology’s media research group, led by Dr. Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein, on these topics, a sliver of which you can read about here.
Since 2019, I’ve been working on producing “ideas” pieces by academics at every stage of their lifecycle with Dave Nussbaum and Isobel Heck. We co-founded Psychgeist, now sponsored by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
In my previous role, I was a researcher and science communicator, at the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University and Massachusetts General Hospital. Co-directed by Lisa Feldman Barrett and Karen Quigley, the lab studies emotions. I coordinated a number of ongoing research, media, education, and policy engagements for the lab. These projects put us collaboration with advocacy groups (like the ACLU), tech companies, and hundreds of journalists, educators, and researchers from all over the world. At the lab, my self-driven reading and writing cohered around an interest in the formation of disciplinary paradigms (ie. prediction) in the behavioral sciences, and how these paradigms interact with society and technology. You can read some of that work here and here, and hear me chat about it here and here. I’ve also published on the subject of police decision-making and supported research on affective regulation and aging.
In Fall 2020, I was the the inaugural Editing Fellow at the Scholars Strategy Network, a national non-profit organization funded by Theda Skocpol, and composed of hundreds and hundreds of university-based scholars who are committed to using research to improve policy and strengthen democracy.
In Spring 2020, I served as a guest expert on a consultation engagement between Venkatesh Rao, the Yak Collective and a leading neurotechnology company. (You can hear Venkat and I talk about his work on consulting here.)
For the 2019-2020 term, I was a graduate student research assistant at the Technology and Public Purpose Project of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, led by the late Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, based in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. I produced reviews of the technical integrity, as well as the ethical and social implications, of frontier technologies like facial recognition, affective computing, and brain-computer interfaces. Taken together, our work aimed at supporting responsible investment in these growing fields. You can read about some of it here.
As a science communicator, I’ve produced text, audio, and video media, as well as convened live programming. Formally, I am currently a Communications Editor at Cambridge University Press for the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and have been an Associate Editor at the MIT-Harvard Science Policy Review, as well as an advisor for the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Virtual Paperless Media Program.
I’m a science communication advisor to the team at the non-profit Playground of Empathy - we received a grant from the Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund in 2020. I’m also an advisor to the team at Empathable, which is working to help organizations build teams that people want to be a part of.
I’ve worked on film with Van Yang and the team at Flow Creative Studios.
I often support groups as a reseacher, including a documentary/podcast project with Rumman Chowdhury, Chris Gilliard, and Scott Tiffany in 2020 and a book project with Bill Gurley since 2022. I supported Stephanie Foo with scientific research for her 2022 debut memoir, What My Bones Know. In 2023, I’m supporting the team at Freakonomics with research for their podcast No Stupid Questions with Stephen Dubner and Angela Duckworth, as well as other audio projects.
I was a member of the 2020 flagship ComSciCon meeting cohort, as well as the 2020 ComSciCon-SciWrite cohort.
When talking about this science communication in audio and video in summer 2019, I sounded like this on mic, and like this on panels.
In 2018 and 2019 I was the executive director of Sound Education, an annual conference and festival for producers and listeners of educational audio. I was the producer, editor, and project manager for Line Edit with James Ryerson; the editor, host, and a producer for Extraordinary from the Robertson Center; the editor and producer of Array Cafe, a podcast supported by the IEEE Sensors Council and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society; a host/producer of New Books in Neuroscience, part of the New Books Network.
I produce audio as a freelancer, as the in-house producer at Wonder Boy Audio, and on projects like Kaiser Permanente’s Ahead in Health, a podcast produced by DIALOGUE, a multi-disciplinary strategy advisory working at the intersection of people, technology, and society. I’ve also been a studio producer, fact-checker, and production assistant for Pushkin Industries, helping with Noah Feldman’s Deep Background, Laurie Santos’s The Happiness Lab, Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales, and Eric Lander’s Brave New Planet, and provided production support for Michael Specter’s Fauci. On the side, I’ve helped produce hundreds and hundreds recordings in the field for shows from This American Life, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, NPR, Gimlet, Wondery, the Ringer, and others.
I graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University in 2017 with a B.A. in Cognitive Science as a College Scholar, Dean’s Scholar, Rawlings Scholar, and inaugural Phi Beta Kappa Scholar. My thesis was supervised by Barbara Finlay, James Cutting, and Laurent Dubreuil, and I did research with each. (I remain an external member of the Humanities Lab, directed by Prof. Dubreuil.) Back then, I looked & sounded like this. During my time in Ithaca, I lived at the Telluride House, and I currently serve as a director/trustee of the Telluride Association, where my roles have included Secretary of the Association, Custodian of our endowment, and committee member on a number of programmatic committees overseeing our year-round and summer residential educational programs. At Cornell, I co-founded and led a local chapter of Learning Unlimited, Splash! at Cornell, served on various levels of student government, taught as a TA the Cornell Prison Education Program, and worked on our synthetic biology team.
In 2019, I received a Masters of Science in Media Advocacy, a joint program offered by the School of Journalism at the College of Art, Media and Design and the School of Law at Northeastern University. In 2020, I completed a Certificate in Business, having pursued a Masters of Business Administration/Masters of Science in Finance degree through the D'amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University.
In high school, I did a bunch of competitive debate (a tendency I’ve since largely recovered from), televised quiz bowl, as well as some social science research with advisory support from Dr. Marc Brackett’s lab at Yale.