Strobel wrote Research Funding in Neuroscience—A Profile of the McKnight Endowment Fund, Academic Press, 2007.

She joined the Alzheimer Research Forum in 2001 as Managing Editor after five years as a science writer at Harvard Medical School, where she had reported on new trends in biomedical science across all disciplines, from enzymology to embryonic development, from cancer genetics to public health. While there, she won an award from the American Medical Writers Association and helped organize special events in science communication.

Prior to that, Strobel specialized in international science reporting, writing news articles and features in English and German for national newspapers and magazines in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. She has written hundreds of articles about topics ranging from computer linguistics to the behavior of geologic fault lines. She has published in Die Zeit and Focus of Germany, Züricher Tagesanzeiger of Switzerland, NRC Handelsblat of the Netherlands, The New Scientist of England, Asahi Shimbun of Tokyo, MIT Technology Review of Boston, Science News of Washington, DC, and other publications.

Strobel is a fellow of the National Press Foundation. She trained in science journalism at Stanford University and the D.C.-based magazine Science News. She graduated with a master's degree in neuroscience from the University of Konstanz in Germany in 1991, with a prior stint at the Friedrich Miescher Institute of the Max Planck Society in Tuebingen and a graduate exchange year in the Neuroscience program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. In 1992, she came to San Francisco with a backpack, story ideas, and plans to stay for a year or two. Many years later, her exit strategy hasn't panned out, and she is now firmly rooted in Dover, Massachusetts, with a scientist-husband, three children, a house, a treehouse, a sailboat, and two cats.

Elizabeth Wu, Senior Knowledge Management Analyst

Elizabeth Wu has been involved in the development with ARF since its inception. She is now the Senior Knowledge Management Analyst for the site focusing upon the search, retrieval, and organization of the site's content. She is also responsible for creating and updating the search strategies behind the Papers of the Week, and for maintaining the genes, drugs, library, and research tools sections of the site.

She graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong majoring in Biology and Biochemistry. While pondering her future as a research scientist, she spent a couple of years working as a research assistant in the medical school there. Soon, she was drawn to the systems behind the organization and retrieval of scientific information and pursued her master's degree in library and information science at the University of Wisconsin. That marked the beginning of her career as a medical librarian specializing in technology applications.

Passionate about her continuous quest for improving scientific communication, Elizabeth pioneered the use of new technology in the organization and delivery of information and knowledge in the biomedical field. While working at the Harvard Medical School Library, she developed the Harvard Medical Web in early 1994. The web site served as a catalyst within the Harvard Medical community, and spawned a number of departmental and programmatic web sites, many of which she helped launch. These sites represent a wide range of innovative implementations such as clinical case studies, a brain image library, and electronic journals.

She feels fortunate to work with a dedicated, creative, and energetic team of professionals who share the same vision in improving scientific communication for the Alzheimer's disease research community. She believes much more could be done for the community and looks forward to developing new ideas for how the site might help achieve this goal.

Tom Fagan, Managing Editor

Tom Fagan is a science writer and editor with a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University College Dublin, Ireland. He has several years' experience as a researcher, first in Japan at Fujisawa Pharmaceutical Company and Osaka Bioscience Institute, then at Harvard University as a postdoctoral fellow and research associate.

Fagan waved goodbye to the bench in 2001 and started out on a new adventure—spending a summer working on Harvard Medical School's publication, Focus. From there he launched himself into his present writing career. Besides his prolific work at Alzforum, Fagan occasionally freelances for other publications, including the Schizophrenia Research Forum, foundations such as the International Osteoporosis Foundation, and other not-for-profits that support research on neurodegenerative diseases.

Fagan is no stranger to adventure. He holds a black belt in karate, has raced his road bike to some of the highest mountaintops in the Japanese Alps (taking a fair number of prizes in the process), has been inducted into the Cape Horn Association for rounding that notorious cape under sail, and is one of the very (mad) few who have sailed in the Southern Ocean, braving its roiling storms and contrary winds for 30 days during leg three of the BT Challenge Round the World Yacht Race. When not chasing some new adventure, he relaxes in Stow, Massachusetts, with his wife Elaine, an artist and writer, and their twin cats Bustopher and Bounderby.

Madolyn Bowman Rogers, Science Writer

Madolyn Rogers, who joined Alzforum in 2010, took a roundabout path before finding her calling as a science writer. She studied Spanish at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, graduating in 1992, and lived overseas for a year in Madrid and a year in The Netherlands. Returning to the States, she worked for several years as an administrative assistant for a small electric motor company in Florida. Needing more of a challenge, she went back to school to study biology at the University of South Florida, graduating in 2000.

Madolyn has always been fascinated by the brain. While working on a Ph.D. in developmental biology at Stanford School of Medicine, she studied neuronal growth factors and helped develop a method for isolating corticospinal motor neurons. She took neuroanatomy with the med students, and soaked up everything she could learn about the development and degeneration of the brain. She received a HHMI Predoctoral Fellowship and attended the Cold Spring Harbor Protein Purification Course. Halfway through her graduate studies, however, Madolyn realized she liked writing about science more than doing benchwork.

After graduating in 2007, she entered the University of California, Santa Cruz science communication program. She interned at the Stanford School of Medicine press office, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and the Santa Cruz Sentinel, as well as at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute. After a stint freelancing and looking for the right job, Madolyn was delighted to become a part of Alzforum, where she combines her passions for writing and neuroscience.

Madolyn lives in a big house on a wooded hillside near Madison, Wisconsin, along with her husband, who is a clinical social worker, and a fireball of a little boy, who is in training to become either a Jedi knight or an astronaut (indications vary). She also lives with extended family and the occasional visiting bat or squirrel. Madolyn enjoys hiking, skiing, writing fantasy novels, and organizing practically anything.

Amber Dance, Science Writer

Amber Dance joined Alzforum in 2008 soon after completing her scientist-to-writer transition. She majored in biology at Brown University, graduating in 2002, and earned her Ph.D. in 2007 at UC San Diego. In graduate school, she wanted to spend as much time as possible peering through the microscope and taking pretty pictures of cells. That interest led her to projects in intracellular trafficking in mammalian cells and sporulation in bacteria. At UCSD, she received an HHMI Predoctoral Fellowship and also attended the Woods Hole Physiology Course in 2004. In 2006 she received the Biology Department's Excellence in Teaching Award.

But her interests were much broader than a single research project, and she turned to journalism as a way to learn about all kinds of science, and then share her excitement with others. Writing also satisfies the right side of her brain, which demands a creative outlet. At the UC Santa Cruz science communication program she honed her skills in relaying research to readers. At UCSC she received a Cary Lu Memorial Fellowship to support her studies.

Amber interned at the Los Angeles Times and San Jose Mercury News. She also worked at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and for QUEST, a public broadcast program about San Francisco Bay area science. Following a summer 2008 stint at Nature's Washington, DC, office, she began freelancing. She was thrilled to become a part of Alzforum, where she focuses on ALS and related neurodegenerative diseases. Her work is funded by Prize4Life, a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the identification of treatments and a cure for ALS.

Amber lives in the Los Angeles area with her husband, a physicist, and a thoroughly spoiled cat called Nutball. She enjoys hiking as well as homey activities such as cooking and knitting. She also loves to travel, and likes planning the itineraries almost as much as she enjoys the actual trip. To encourage young people with an interest in science, she volunteers as an online "expert" with Science Buddies, answering questions from students working on science fair projects.

Esther Landhuis, Science Writer

Joining Alzforum in 2008 marked Esther Landhuis's third career shift in five years. While working on a Ph.D. in immunology at Harvard, Esther realized that her knack for putting science into words outshone her motivation to find insight within the hundreds of mouse spleens and thymuses she was mashing. So after much soul-searching and the completion of her doctorate in 2003, she entered the UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program—a nine-month boot camp that turns science practitioners into science writers.

While at UCSC, Esther interned at the city's daily paper, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, and wrote science stories for Stanford News Service and Science magazine's former website on research in aging, SAGE KE. She then did a yearlong internship at the San Jose Mercury News, covering science and health. After several months as a freelance writer (SAGE KE, ScienceNOW, Biomedical Computation Review), the birth of a baby—and another one 18 months later—thrust Esther into her most challenging job thus far: stay-at-home mom. Changing diapers, enduring tantrums and wondering when and how she would ever resume her science writing adventures, she decided the Alzforum opportunity could not have come at a better time.

Esther lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, who is a physicist-turned-engineering project manager, and their two children—a chatty lass and her fearless brother. She enjoys classical and folk music, shopping on craigslist, watching Boston and Stanford sports teams, and good conversation over tea. Esther considers herself an initiator, organizer, and pursuer of truth.

Gwyneth Dickey Zakaib, Science Writer

A native of Washington, DC, Gwyneth Zakaib joined Alzforum in October of 2011, not long after her grandfather lost a decade-long battle with Alzheimer's disease. She can think of no better career focus than joining the quest for a cure.

Gwyneth has straddled the fields of science and music throughout her education and career. As an undergraduate at the University of Maryland at College Park (UMCP), she majored in both neurobiology and cello performance. On the side, she participated in Alzheimer's disease research at the National Institute of Mental Health and taught music to preschool children. She later combined her interests in brain science and music in a kinesiology master's degree at UMCP, where she studied motor performance in musically educated children.

During graduate school, Gwyneth wrote science articles for the UMCP communication office and realized that science journalism would widen the scope of her science exploration. She won an AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellowship, interned at National Public Radio headquarters in Washington, DC, and then attended the Science Communication Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. During her stay in California, she wrote science stories for the Monterey County Herald, KUSP Radio, and the Stanford News Service. She returned to the East Coast to intern at Science News and Nature before joining the Alzforum team.

Gwyneth lives in DC with her husband, who does research in foreign policy. In her free time, Gwyneth performs as a soprano and cellist in the DC metro area.

Nico Stanculescu, Event Coordinator

Nico Stanculescu jokingly refers to herself as "Diagonally Parked in a Parallel World" though truthfully admitting she just doesn't know how to parallel park. But with an instinct for networking and making things happen, Nico finds the right people to park cars, play music, cater events or set up exhibit booths. It's all—according to her—in the foundation of win-win and interdependence within a team.

And where did ARF meet Nico? It all happened while working for the Alzheimer's Association in Chicago, where she managed research grants operations. There, she had completely redesigned operational structures and managed the transition from paper to electronic grant application submission and review. From producing events for several hundreds of people to organizing live discussions for the Forum, Nico approaches each project with a can-do attitude and desire to make each project a big success.

Nico grew up in East Africa, lived in Europe for 15 years, and traveled extensively in Asia. She now lives in Chicago and owns a meeting and event planning company, World Events Forum, Inc.. <

Elaine Alibrandi, Copy Editing, Web Production

Elaine Alibrandi, a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art, exhibits her oil/mixed media paintings and installations at museums and galleries worldwide (see artworks).

After college, she worked as a freelance designer, but although the work was interesting, she was dissatisfied with having marketing take precedence over creativity, as it must in commercial design. After a brief detour, during which one of her clients held her hostage for several years in its commercial finance department, she escaped to pursue freelance writing, editing, and Web production, which offer hours flexible enough for her to focus on her art.

Elaine writes a wide range of material for several companies and publishing houses, from ads and radio spots to articles for art magazines and chapters in history and reference books. Her poetry has been published extensively in literary journals and poetry magazines.

She holds a black belt in karate from the Japan Karate Association in Brookline.