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I’m a communications and content strategist with 20 years of hands-on experience working with the media and developing creative content to help innovative brands tell their stories, grow audiences and build reputations. My writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Vox, Lonely Planet, Washington Post, CNN, Discovery, USA Today, BBC Travel, SF Gate, Via Magazine, and more, and I have contributed to several Lonely Planet books. See my most recent publications on Muckrack or Contently.

I currently focus on science communication and media relations as the Communications Director for the Innovative Genomics Institute, the epicenter of CRISPR genome-editing research at UC Berkeley, founded by Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna. I previously managed research communications for the University of California Office of the President, focusing on sustainability and innovation stories emerging from the UC system.

In the travel space, I worked in-house at Airbnb, Lonely Planet, a travel startup that went *poof* for typical startup reasons (and several atypical reasons as well), and I co-founded The Statesider. I have consulted for a variety of brands including Impossible Foods, Chime, and Postbox, and developed custom content for McSweeney’s, TOMS, and DoorDash.

Fern (and my own) evolution

Before all of the above, I got a PhD in biology, studying plant genomics and fern evolution at UC Berkeley. How does one jump from sequencing fern genomes to becoming a content strategist? It helped that I have always been a writer. After that it just took four easy steps:

• Step 1: Travel abroad to a bunch of obscure destinations looking for rare plants.
• Step 2: Realize after several years that you’re more interested in travel than lab work.
• Step 3: Finish your Ph.D., move to London, work at the Natural History Museum, get a job as a journal editor, start a travel blog.
• Step 4: Parlay all of the above into a job at a major travel publisher who happened to like hiring overeducated nerds with unusual backgrounds and a love of wordplay.

I am still continuing botanical research as time permits, following up on questions left lingering from my earlier work on Marattiaceae and the ferns of California, Oregon and Washington, and have recently contributed to several academic articles on CRISPR gene editing. See my latest publications on Google Scholar — more coming soon!

Connect with me

Please feel free to reach out any time on Bluesky or LinkedIn.

PLEASE DON’T SEND TRAVEL PR PITCHES. I promise you I’m not interested in writing about fall foliage just because I did once 10 years ago. No offense to fall foliage. It’s pretty.