Hi! I'm Alison.

My interests and pursuits include mid-century modern furniture, Stephen King and Haruki Murakami novels, HBO's The Leftovers, my mint green Fiat 500, and smart home automation. I love to golf...poorly. I share my home with my husband of 12 years and six rescued animals -- three Norwegian Elkhounds (Chewie, Lyanna, and Nora) and three cats (Eames, Daphne, and Clementine).

Back in the dark ages when I was in high school, our programming curriculum consisted of a single class in GW-Basic on already-outdated Commodore 64s. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but at the time it wasn't considered part of the "academic" track to be interested in computers. I earned a Bachelor's degree in microbiology because it seemed interesting at the time, but I never really thought about what job I would actually do with that degree. It turns out that if you don't want to work in a lab, the answer is not much.

I decided to pursue a PhD in genetics at the University of Chicago and discovered computational genetics -- no wet lab work required. I dual-booted my Windows laptop with Linux and taught myself enough Perl, R, and C++ to to develop and run coalescent simulations and process the data for my dissertation. This started my self-taught dive into software and development.

After years of working in software engineering-adjacent roles, I'm taking a leap and fully transitioning into a pure software engineering role. I couldn't be more thrilled to be joining the Natera team working on their provider portal!