Gabrielle Strobel, Executive Editor

Gabrielle Strobel oversees Alzforum's editorial operations, including research and conference reporting, expert commentary, and webinar discussions. She initiated the AlzBiomarkers database and curates the Therapeutics database. 

Gabrielle joined Alzforum in 2001 after five years as a science writer at Harvard Medical School. Prior to that, she freelanced in English and German for national newspapers and magazines in Europe, Japan, and the United States. Gabrielle trained in science journalism at Stanford University and the D.C.-based magazine Science News. She graduated in 1991 with a master's degree in neuroscience from the University of Konstanz in Germany, with prior stints at the Friedrich Miescher Institute of the Max Planck Society in Tuebingen and the neuroscience program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Gabrielle serves on the Alzheimer's Prevention Registry Executive Committee and the SyNergy Munich Cluster for Systems Neurology Scientific Advisory Board. She is a fellow of the National Press Foundation, author of Research Funding in Neuroscience: A Profile of the McKnight Endowment Fund, Academic Press, 2007, and scientific adviser for the 2016 Nova documentary Can Alzheimer’s Be Stopped?

Elizabeth Wu, Director of Innovation Development

Elizabeth is responsible for managing and directing innovation and strategy development for Alzforum.  She believes turning research data into information and putting it in context will greatly facilitate the communication and understanding of research findings and thus accelerate the discovery of treatment for disease.  She leads the planning and development of new projects and resources, and manages the production, curation, and technology of the Alzforum site.

Elizabeth has been with Alzforum since its inception.  Before joining Alzforum, she was associate director at Harvard Medical School Library and was responsible for strategic planning and managing the technology development for the library.  She launched the Harvard Medical Web and helped create many online resources for the faculty. She graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong with degrees in biology and biochemistry, and completed her master's degree in library and information science at the University of Wisconsin.

Tom Fagan, Managing Editor

Tom Fagan is managing editor at Alzforum, reporting to Gabrielle Strobel. Tom manages the day-to-day operation of the Alzforum editorial team, assigning and editing news stories and overseeing content on the website and weekly newsletter. Tom began writing as a freelancer for Alzforum in 2001, soon becoming a full-time staff writer, and then managing editor in 2011.

Before joining Alzforum, Tom honed his writing skills at the Office of Public Affairs at Harvard Medical School, Boston. He had swapped pipettes for pens after working as post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard University, Cambridge, and before that at Osaka Bioscience Institute, and Fujisawa Pharmaceutical Company, Tsukuba, Japan. Tom graduated with a Ph.D in biochemistry from University College Dublin, Ireland, where he was born.

When not immersed in science, Tom loves working in his woodshop or riding his bike, typically up steep mountain passes. He has won his age group several times in the annual race up Mt. Washington, New Hampshire. He lives in Stow, Massachusetts.

Madolyn Bowman Rogers, Science Writer

Madolyn Bowman Rogers, who reports from Wisconsin, joined Alzforum in 2010. Madolyn inherited her interest in the brain, as well as a love of words, from her neuroscientist father. She first earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then majored in biology at the University of South Florida. From there she went on to Stanford School of Medicine, where she studied developmental neurobiology. After earning her Ph.D. in 2007, she again returned to the world of words and completed the science communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before joining the Alzforum team, Madolyn interned at the Stanford School of Medicine press office, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute.

Pat McCaffrey, Science Writer

After receiving a PhD in Applied Biology, Pat spent more than a decade doing cancer and immunology research in academia and the pharmaceutical industry. In 2004, she completed the Master’s program in Science Writing at Boston University. Pat published her first Alzforum news story in March 2005, and since then has worked off and on for the site, writing news and covering conferences. From 2010-2015, she was the founding editor of the Pain Research Forum, a web site modeled on the Alzforum for the neuropathic pain research community. Back at Alzforum, Pat now curates the Therapeutics Database.

When she is not writing about clinical trials, Pat enjoys bicycling, cooking, and all types of sewing and needlework.

Jessica Shugart, Science Writer

Jessica Shugart joined Alzforum in 2014. She became captivated by the immune system as an undergraduate at UC San Diego and dove in deeper as a graduate student at UC Berkeley. After earning her PhD in 2007, Jessica studied T cell activation as a postdoc at the Earle A. Chiles Research Institute in Portland, Oregon. In 2012, Jessica realized she loved telling the tales of science more than doing experiments, so she left the bench and completed the science communication program at UC Santa Cruz. Jessica has written for the Stanford University School of Medicine, the Monterey Herald, the San Jose Mercury News, and Science News in Washington, D.C. She reports from Chico in northern California.

Kathleen Zahs, Senior Biocuration Scientist

Kathy Zahs joined Alzforum in 2017, after being a devoted member for more than a decade. She is responsible for the ongoing curation of Alzforum’s scientific databases and directories. Kathy received her A.B. in biology from Princeton and her Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco, where she studied central nervous system development and plasticity before moving to the emerging field of glial cell biology. As a faculty member at the University of Minnesota, Kathy conducted research in glial biology and taught neuroscience . A desire to work on problems directly related to human health led to her joining the N. Bud Grossman Center for Memory Research and Care, where she researched the molecular basis of memory loss in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease. Her goal at Alzforum is to provide accessible, up-to-date information useful to those interested in neurodegenerative diseases.

Marina Chicurel, Biocuration Scientist

Marina Chicurel began working as a writer for Alzforum in 2017 and joined the database curation team a year later. As a curator, she helps scientists access, share, and analyze data, primarily by growing and maintaining Alzforum’s databases. Marina earned a B.S. in basic biomedical research from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard Univeristy. Before joining Alzforum, she served as science director at the Hereditary Disease Foundation.

Lucia Huntington, Copy Editor

Before joining Alzforum in 2013, Lucia Huntington was a journalist who worked in Boston for the Globe and the Herald newspapers, and internationally for The JoongAng Daily in Seoul and The International Herald Tribune (now the International New York Times) in Hong Kong. In 2005-2006 she joined NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, Afghanistan, as senior editor for its news service Sada-e Azadi.

Lucia earned her bachelor's degree from Tufts University with a major in history and a focus in classics. A frequent contributor to the Boston Globe and the Harvard Gazette, she was also certified as a paralegal but always felt a pull toward newspapers and their ability to dispense important information clearly and in short order.

Sean Hellwig, Senior Software Engineer

Sean Hellwig has been with the Alzforum team since 2012. He is responsible for creating and implementing all of the software solutions that Alzforum needs. Prior to joining Alzforum, Sean was a Software Architect and Engineer for consulting firms in Silicon Valley. When he is not writing or dreaming of code, he enjoys spending his free time outside hiking, fly fishing, and camping with his family in the rivers, lakes and mountains of northwest Montana.

Stacie Weninger, Special Advisor

Stacie Weninger is the president of FBRI. Prior to this position, she was the senior director of science programs for the Fidelity Foundations. In 2005, Dr. Weninger served as the project manager and senior analyst for the Task Force on Women in Science at Harvard University. From 2001–2005, Dr. Weninger was a senior scientist at Cell Press for the journal Neuron. Before joining Cell Press, Dr. Weninger was a postdoctoral research fellow at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School with Dr. Bruce Yankner. She was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute predoctoral fellow in the program in neuroscience at Harvard University. While a graduate student and postdoctoral research fellow, Dr. Weninger was actively involved in undergraduate teaching, winning six teaching awards.

Dr. Weninger received a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard University, and a B.S. degree in chemistry with highest honors from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She currently chairs the Collaboration for Alzheimer’s Prevention; is special advisor to Alzforum; chairs the board of directors for Rugen Therapeutics; serves on the boards of directors for Aratome, Atalanta, Eikonizo, RBNC, Sironax, and Target ALS; and serves as a member of the scientific advisory boards for the Indian Institute of Science’s Centre for Brain Research and the U.K. Dementia Research Institute. She is also a member of Pfizer’s genetics scientific advisory panel. She previously served as a founding member of the board of directors for Denali Therapeutics (NASDAQ: DNLI); as well as a member of the board of directors for Abelian (acquired by RBNC), Annexon Biosciences (NASDAQ: ANNX), BRI-Alzan (acquired by MeiraGTx), Digital Cognition Technologies (acquired by Linus Health), Enspectra, Inscopix, Syllable Life Sciences (acquired by RBNC), and Q-State Biosciences.

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