Welcome to the Milkyway Cafe

My name is Allie. I see science in everyday life, from the patterns of the ocean to the patterns of traffic. I enjoy how understanding science helps understand the world around us and even politics and current events.

I have been many things in my half century on Earth:  a tree-hugging liberal;  a hot-chocolate-drinking student in the Pacific Northwest;  a science dilettante/student; a science evangelist at NASA; a stay-at-home mom.

In the years that I was at home watching my kids grow (and not running my own science experiments on them), I had time to pursue many of my broader science interests.

I’m currently embarking on a new chapter as a science writer for the Data Sciences Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT/Harvard, bringing bioinformatics research to the cloud with an open-source, cloud-native platform, Terra.

Come with me as I untangle some of the science, both positive and negative, found all around – in the streets you walk, the places you live, and in the news.