Over the course of the week, a cadre of bloggers will be posting on the full spectrum of science topics covered at Fall Meeting! These bloggers are students in UC Santa Cruz’s Science Communication program. More info about each student is posted below:

Nadia Drake grew up in Santa Cruz and then lived on the east coast for more than a decade. She graduated from Cornell University in 2002 with majors in biology, psychology and dance, then worked in a clinical genetics lab at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School in Baltimore for two years. She went back to Cornell and earned her PhD in genetics in 2009. Her interests span science topics from the very small (DNA methylation) to the very large (colliding galaxies).

Melissae Fellet grew up in Florida and spent a few years in Missouri. Now, she’s hiking through the redwoods in the mountains north of Santa Cruz and scanning the Pacific Ocean for glimpses of feeding dolphins and sea lions. Following a fascination with atoms and molecules to graduate school, she completed a Ph.D. in chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis. One of the things she enjoys about science writing is exploring fields outside her expertise. Because she loves to be outside, enjoys writing about biology, ecology, and the environment.

Donna Hesterman earned her Master’s degree from Auburn University in 2006 after 10 years of service with the U.S. Marine Corps. After graduating, she worked for the USDA as a wildlife biologist in Ventura, California. Most of her academic work was in ecology and evolutionary biology.

A native Californian, Jane Lee went to graduate school at UCLA’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She studied jellyfish for her Master’s work, diving for them off the coast of Panama and using remotely operated vehicles to study them off the coast of California. Jane also has an abiding love of sea slugs. Invertebrates fascinate her because they do everything people do, but with less equipment.

Catherine Meyers grew up in Boulder, Colo., where she developed a love for mountains, clear skies, and clean air. She comes to science writing with a background in engineering, and she is particularly interested in the cool contraptions that scientists use to gather their data.

Keith Rozendal’s father was a petroleum geologist who loved field work. He helped Keith to develop a scientific mind and an appreciation of nature. After earning a doctorate in social psychology from UC Santa Barbara, Keith taught psychology methods, history, and statistics in the Cal State system. While studying psychology, astronomy, and space physics at Rice University in Houston, he also began a long career in community-based radio–as a music programmer and a director of news and public affairs. He just completed an internship at the Santa Cruz Sentinel and he will intern with the SETI Institute’s radio program “Are We Alone?” beginning January.

Prior to graduate school, Danielle Venton studied biology at Humboldt State University and worked as a physics and technology writer in the IT Department at CERN. She has lived and worked in four countries. Aside from collecting stamps in her passport, Danielle enjoys hiking, reading and music. Last fall she interned at the Monterey County Herald, and during the winter she will be be an intern for Wired.com

Susan Young earned her doctorate in molecular biology at UC Berkeley, where she studied early animal evolution. she loves writing about the natural sciences because she’s fascinated by life and the planet it calls home.

Sascha Zubryd loves science! In college, she found cognitive neuroscience especially fascinating, and loved studying what drives human and animal behavior. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from UC Davis. As a Bay Area native, she grew up visiting the Academy of Sciences and other wonderful museums. That experience cultivated in her a lasting hunger for understanding, a desire to know how and why the world is the way it is. She particularly enjoys learning and writing about the life sciences because so many factors–cosmological, geophysical, chemical–influence life’s form and function.

–Mohi Kumar, AGU Science Writer