About Us

Elena Kallestinova / Director / ek007@mit.edu

Elena Kallestinova is Director of the Writing and Communication Center at MIT. Since joining MIT in 2020, she has been teaching written, oral, and visual communication and overseeing programs offered by the WCC…. Dr. Kallestinova is passionate about developing communication programs and resources, collaborating with colleague inside and outside MIT, teaching communication classes and working with her WCC team. She came to MIT after working for twelve years at Yale University, where she founded and expanded the Graduate Writing Center and served as Assistant Dean for Writing and Communication in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Kallestinova holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics, an M.A. in TESOL, and an M.A./B.A. in Computational Linguistics. She has trained, taught, and mentored undergraduate and graduate students for more than twenty-five years and brings extensive expertise in working with international and multilingual scholars.

Elizabeth Fox / Lecturer / emfox@mit.edu

Elizabeth works in MIT’s Writing and Communication Center and as a freelance editor. She has taught WGS.101, Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies, and been a Writing Advisor for Introduction to World Music and Introduction to Western Music, among others…. She is on the board of PsyArt, a foundation that supports the psychological study of the arts and holds annual international conferences, and has been President and Secretary of the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America. She publishes on feminism, psychoanalysis, Lawrence, and related topics. Her chapter on Edwardian Feminisms, Suffrage, and Anti-suffrage appears in D. H. Lawrence in Context, Ed. Andrew Harrington (Cambridge University Press). Ph.D. in English and American Literature, Boston University; M.Ed., Boston University; B.A. in English with pre-med, Wellesley College.

Bob Irwin / Lecturer / irw@mit.edu

Robert A. Irwin studied philosophy at Princeton University and Antioch College and earned a Ph.D. in sociology at Brandeis University…. He has taught at Tufts, Brandeis, and Holy Cross and, since 2000, at MIT’s Writing and Communication Center. His book Building a Peace System was praised for its scope and clarity. It warned – in 1989 – of the dangerous disruptive potential of climate change caused by global warming. Bob enjoys working with the range of undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, staff, and faculty who come to the Writing Center to consult about their highly varied writing and communication tasks. Helping people with any aspect of thinking, planning, and writing, and providing both encouragement and honest feedback, are hallmarks of his work.

Chris Featherman / Lecturer / cmf28@mit.edu

Chris Featherman is a full-time Lecturer in the Writing and Communication Center. He earned his M.A. in Teaching and Ph.D. in Language and Rhetoric from the University of Washington in Seattle…. Before coming to MIT, he taught writing and research to undergraduates and graduates at Northeastern University, and he has been teaching for more than two decades. Chris has authored an academic monograph on language, media, and politics, and he has written essays and reviews for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the London School of Economics Review of Books, New Media & Society, and various other publications. He enjoys supporting writers at any stage of the drafting process, from brainstorming to revising, and specializes in working with English-language learners and in developing clients’ oral and visual communication skills.

Sophia Richardson / Lecturer /srichar9@mit.edu

Sophia (Sophie) Richardson is a Lecturer in the Writing and Communication Center. She is committed to exploring the intersection of the humanities and new technologies, using new platforms to propel learning, teaching, and research…. After obtaining her B.A. in comparative literature from Oberlin College, she went on to complete a Ph.D. in English literature at Yale University, where she specialized in early modern British literature (1500-1700) at the intersection of poetry and science. She would love to work with you to help you optimize concision, precision, and flow as you write and revise. Many years of both teaching first-year writing at Brandeis and Yale and consulting in the Yale Graduate Writing Lab have given her the taste for working with writers both brand new and highly seasoned in a wide variety of disciplines and genres. She welcomes clients at all stages of writing and is open to all kinds of projects, from coursework essays to dissertation chapters, personal statements to grant proposals, presentations to popular science articles.

Pamela Siska / Lecturer / pjsiska@mit.edu

Pamela Siska has been with MIT’s Writing and Communication Center since 1993, and she was a contributor to the MIT-authored The Mayfield Handbook of Technical & Scientific Writing…. For ten years, she also taught graduate writing classes for MIT’s Supply Chain Management program. Pamela holds an M.A. in English from Boston University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pretoria. She has published articles on medieval and Victorian literature, but her area of specialization is Romanticism. Her chapter on Mary Shelley and material objects appears in Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices (Ashgate, 2009), and her dissertation, which she is turning into a book, explores the letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Susan Spilecki / Lecturer / spilecki@mit.edu

Susan Spilecki teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northeastern University. She has an MFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing and an MA in Theological Studies…. Her work has been published in Potomac Review, Ekphrasis, Princetown Arts Review, Quarterly West and Frontiers. As a prolific writer, she is fascinated by helping people, as the writer David Huddle says, “achieve a circumstance of ongoing work, the serenity to carry out the daily writing and revising of what… [works] are given one to write.”

Adrienne Tierney / Lecturer / atierney@mit.edu

Adrienne Tierney is a full-time Lecturer at the Writing and Communication Center. Before coming to MIT, she taught writing, psychology, cognitive science, emotion, and human development to undergraduates, graduates, and postgraduates at Harvard for over a decade. She has also provided writing instruction and support for professionals in biotech and medicine…. She has a background in cognitive neuroscience and development with an Ed.D. in human development and education and an Ed.M. in mind, brain, and education, a M.S. in neuroscience, and a B.A in neuroscience and science in society. She would be happy to meet with you at any phase of the writing process—whether you need feedback on something that is already a work-in-progress or a listening ear to brainstorm possible ideas.

Talia Zheng / WCC Fellow /taliaz@mit.edu

Talia works as a WCC Graduate Community Fellow sponsored by the Office of Graduate Education. She helps the WCC with various projects related to data visualization. Talia is a graduate student at the Department of Chemical Engineering in Doyle Research Group…. She She graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2022 with a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering. Her research is broadly situated in the field of pharmaceutical formulation, hydrogels, nanoemulsions. In the past, she’s worked at Procter & Gamble as an Intern.

Max Jahns / WCC Fellow / mjahns@mit.edu

Max (they/them) works as a WCC Graduate Community Fellow sponsored by the Office of Graduate Education. Max helps the WCC with various projects related to WCC’s visibility. Max is a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography and Applied Ocean Science studying the ecological and biogeochemical dynamics of marine microbial communities…. Max studies mixotrophic organisms from a variety of interdisciplinary angles straddling multiple departments. In addition to being a WCC fellow, Max serves on the board of the peer-to-peer graduate application mentoring program JP-ASK, is an organizer for the WHOI Student Union, and likes to play ukulele in their free time.

Mariel Garcia-Montes / WCC Fellow / marielgm@mit.edu

Mariel García-Montes is a WCC Fellow in the Writing and Communication Center, where she facilitates Writing Together program sessions. She is a researcher of media and information technology, especially as they contribute to the public interest and social change…. She is a PhD candidate at the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society program at MIT, where she is writing a dissertation on 20th and 21st century sociotechnical history of surveillance in Mexico.

Abigail Jackson / WCC Fellow / abigaimj@mit.edu

Abigail Jackson is a WCC Fellow in the Writing and Communication Center. In her job as a fellow, she helps organize the Writing Together program and facilitate WCC online and in-person Writing sessions. She is a Ph.D. candidate at HST’s Medical Engineering and Medical Physics program at Harvard-MIT joint program…. Her research examines …

Kathryn Urban / WCC Fellow / urban96@mit.edu

Kathryn is a WCC Writing Fellow helping organize and facilitate Writing the Together program at the Writing and Communication Center. She is a Ph.D. student at the MIT Department of Political Science specializing in Security Studies and International Relations…. Her research interests include emerging military technologies, strategy formulation, and defense aid. Before coming to MIT, Kathryn worked in U.S. defense policy and academic programming, including as Deputy Director of Bridging the Gap. She graduated summa cum laude from George Washington University with a BA in International Affairs. She also holds an MA from American University’s School of International Service, where she received her department’s Academic Performance Award and Outstanding Research Award.

Olivia Houck/ WCC Fellow / owhouck@mit.edu

Olivia is a WCC Fellow in the Writing and Communication Center. She is a doctoral candidate in the History of Architecture program at MIT, where she studies the intersection of the built environment, diplomacy, and geopolitics during the Cold War. She is particularly interested in NATO, U.S. and Nordic foreign policies, technology and infrastructure in the North American and European Arctic regions….She enjoys building and participating in academic communities, and has worked with the MSRP program, MITES, the Teaching and Learning Lan, and the Experiential Ethics programs.