HOME

The start of my science writing career, as a 2016 AAAS Mass Media Fellow at Discover (photo credit: Ernie Mastroianni)

Current Positions

STEM Writing Specialist and Lecturer
        Hixon Writing Center, California Institute of Technology

Freelance Science Writer
Contributing Editor, Discover magazine

Recent Positions

Anthropology Lecturer
        California Institute of Technology
        Pasadena City College

Curriculum vitae September 2021

Frequently tweeting @bannelia

---

about me

As a science writer I primarily cover human origins, archaeology and evolutionary biology. My stories have appeared in outlets including Discover, Science, Smithsonian, Atlas Obscura, and Audubon.

As a STEM Writing Specialist & Lecturer at Caltech's Hixon Writing Center, I teach and tutor members of the Caltech community to communicate their science to audiences within and beyond academia.

Over the years, I've taught undergraduate and graduate courses about anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, and science communication.

I earned my PhD in 2016 from Harvard University in Anthropological Archaeology & Human Evolutionary Biology. My research focused on understanding the processes by which Homo sapiens spread globally as other human groups, like Neanderthals, went extinct over the past 200,000 years. With methodological expertise in radiocarbon dating and geochemical analyses, I've done fieldwork in the Balkans, eastern Europe, and the Levant.

For undergrad, I attended Dartmouth College and majored in Geochemistry and Anthropology. I was class of '08, but didn't earn my degree until 2009, in part because I forgot to pay for a yoga P.E. class.