Bio

I live in Brussels, Belgium 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 Smitten Kitchen 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:

In March 2025, I joined Convergent Research, a nonprofit that builds critical infrastructure to create scientific public goods by starting Focused Research Organizations, or FROs. FROs bring together brilliant people and cutting-edge technology to tackle large-scale, tightly coordinated, non-profit projects. I help tell their stories.

At Convergent, we believe that humanity is missing Essential Technologies, fundamental capabilities that unblock science bottlenecks across dozens of fields. Our FROs, like E11 Bio, Cultivarium, Parallel Squared Technology Institute, EvE Bio, Lean, Forest Neurotech, IMPRINT, and [C]Worthy, address these critical gaps.

From 2020 to 2025, I worked full-time at Ginkgo Bioworks, the worker-owned organism company, most recently as Director of Communications and Corporate Affairs in the Sociotechnical Studio, primarily focused on communication and governance infrastructures.

Ginkgo's mission is to make biology easier to engineer. During my time there, Ginkgo offered end-to-end capabilities and unparalleled scale to companies creating the next generation of medicines, foods, materials, and more, and built biosecurity infrastructure for the 21st century. My role at Ginkgo involved supporting a wide variety of functions in the cell engineering business and across the public health and biosecurity business, Ginkgo Biosecurity. I reported to the CEO and my roles included creative (text, audio, and video), policy, strategy, marketing, investor relations, internal communications, public and media relations, sales, science communication, and cultivating care for platform use by building norms and mechanisms for worker ownership. I led the writing and review of all corporate press releases and oversaw media engagement. I was the primary point of contact for investor relations. I was a senior editor and member of the publishing team at Grow by Ginkgo. I planned and co-hosted regular Town Halls and all-hands meetings, supported companywide strategy, oversaw the daily newsletter, produced quarterly earnings calls, ran the audiovisual studio, and developed companywide policy and infrastructure, including cultural principles, major change management initiatives, and mechanisms like committee elections.

I'm committed to expanding worker ownership through education, and am a board member of the Sand Mountain Cooperative Education Center based in Alabama, which launched the Alabama Center for Worker Ownership in collaboration with the Employee Ownership Expansion Network and the National Center for Employee Ownership. In 2023, I participated in the Aspen Business-Labor Roundtable. In 2025–26, I was an Executive Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at the School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR) at Rutgers University.

In 2026, I earned a JD from the City University of New York's School of Law.

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 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, Elemental, and Templeton Ideas, and was a member of the inaugural cohort of Ideas Matter fellows in 2024.

I'm passionate about how the ways in which we make media change how we talk about ideas and facts. From 2022 to 2025, I was a Research Fellow with Knology's media research group, led by Dr. Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein, working on these topics; you can read a sliver of that work here.

Since 2019, I've collaborated with Dave Nussbaum and Isobel Heck on producing "ideas" pieces by academics at every stage of their lifecycle. In 2022, we co-founded Psychgeist, now sponsored by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. I also support Team Onagadori, a monthly meeting of a community of practice for book authors in the sciences and humanities.

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 in 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 (i.e., 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 inaugural Editing Fellow at the Scholars Strategy Network, a national non-profit organization founded 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 advised the non-profit Playground of Empathy, which received a grant from the Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund in 2020. That work later evolved into Empathable, which helps organizations build teams that people want to be a part of. From 2022 to 2025, I was a formal advisor to the team, and I continue to advise them informally.

I've worked on film with Van Yang and the team at Flow Creative Studios.

I often support groups as a researcher, including a documentary/podcast project with Rumman Chowdhury, Chris Gilliard, and Scott Tiffany in 2020 and a book project with Bill Gurley. I supported Stephanie Foo with scientific research for her debut memoir, What My Bones Know, and work regularly with authors on science and storytelling. In 2023, I supported 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.

From 2018 to 2023, 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 Café, 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.

From 2019 to 2023, I was an executive producer at Wonder Boy Audio. I continue to produce audio as a freelancer, including 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. I've also fact-checked books, like Stripe Press's Origins of Efficiency by the Institute for Progress's Brian Potter, author of Construction Physics, which I edit (among other projects) as a Contributing Editor for the Institute for Progress. On the side, I've helped produce hundreds of 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, and Rawlings Scholar, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa as co-winner of the inaugural Cornell Phi Beta Kappa Scholarship Prize. My thesis was supervised by Barbara Finlay, James Cutting, and Laurent Dubreuil, and I did research with each. I was a member and later affiliate of the Humanities Lab, directed by Prof. Dubreuil. Back then, I looked and 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, served as a TA in 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.