About Us

Elena Kallestinova / Director / ek007@mit.edu

Elena Kallestinova is Director of the Writing and Communication Center (WCC) at MIT, where she leads a team of lecturers and graduate student fellows serving writers and communicators across the Institute. For more than twenty-five years she has taught, trained, and mentored students in written, oral, and visual communication. At MIT, in addition to teaching, Dr. Kallestinova oversees the WCC’s individual consultations, develops the Center’s workshop curriculum, manages the work of the Oral Communication Studio, directs the Public Speaking and Public Writing certificate programs, and coordinates the Writing Together program. She has served on the organizing committee of the MIT Research Slam since 2021 and enjoys building new programs and connections with colleagues across campus.…. Dr. Kallestinova came to MIT from Yale University, where she founded the Graduate Writing Center and served as Assistant Dean for Writing and Communication in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics, an M.A. in TESOL, and degrees in Computational Linguistics. Her research addresses the needs of graduate writers, support for neurodivergent students, oral communication tools, writing center studies, and tutor education. In recent years she has also examined how graduate students develop communication expertise alongside generative AI tools. She publishes this work in book chapters and peer-reviewed articles.

Chris Featherman / Lecturer / cmf28@mit.edu

Chris Featherman brings over two decades of teaching experience to helping MIT writers transform complex research into clear, persuasive communication. Whether you are brainstorming a thesis chapter, shaping a research statement or statement of purpose, structuring a conference talk, or refining a journal manuscript, Chris offers tailored support from project concept to completion. He specializes in developing clients’ oral and visual communication skills alongside their written work…. A full-time Lecturer in the WCC, Chris holds a Ph.D. in Language and Rhetoric from the University of Washington and is the author of an academic monograph on media, rhetoric, and public discourse as well as essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the London School of Economics Review of Books, and elsewhere.

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 brings decades of experience at the WCC to helping MIT writers clarify their thinking and prose. Whether you are working on a course paper or a thesis, drafting a fellowship application or a personal statement, or revising a manuscript for submission, Bob can help at any stage, from planning to final draft. He works with undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, staff, and faculty from any discipline, and offers both encouragement and honest feedback…. At the WCC since 2000, Bob 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 authored Building a Peace System (now available free online), which warned in 1989 of the lethal potential of climate disruption.

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 is a Lecturer in MIT’s Writing and Communication Center, and she was a contributor to the MIT-authored The Mayfield Handbook of Technical & Scientific Writing. Pamela enjoys meeting with clients about all kinds of written and spoken projects, but she is particularly interested in working on academic documents such as journal papers, conference papers, theses, and dissertations at any stage from brainstorming to polishing…. 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 (where she taught writing before coming to MIT) 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 has several decades of experience as an instructor of written and oral communication and teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northeastern University. Susan works with all kinds of genres, from course essays and journal papers, to dissertations and job materials, helping your tailor your writing process to become a more effective writer…. Susan 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.

Hung Vo / WCC Fellow / hungvo@mit.edu

Hung Vo is a WCC Graduate Community Fellow sponsored by the Office of Graduate Education. He is a doctoral student in political economy, and his research explores how states and state-backed capital steer economic and technological transformations…. Hung is a graduate of Cornell University and Harvard University and worked as a U.S. diplomat for six years prior to MIT.

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

Mariel García-Montes is a WCC Fellow, working as part of the Writing Together Program. She joined the WCC in 2024. Mariel is a Ph.D. graduate student at the Comparative Media Studies program and the Center of Civic Media. She has worked doing communications, instructional design and research around open data, privacy and security, strategic communications and other digital literacies for SocialTIC (Mexico), Unicef (HQ); as a consultant for School of Data, the Open Knowledge Foundation, the engine room and Internews; and as an intern for the Youth and Media Lab at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She is a philosophy graduate from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and a Berkman Klein Center affiliate.

Kathryn Urban / WCC Fellow / urban96@mit.edu

Kathryn Urban is a WCC Fellow, working as part of the Writing Together Program. She joined the WCC in 2024. Kathryn 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.

Briana Cuero / WCC Fellow / bcuero13@mit.edu

Briana Cuero is a WCC Fellow, working as part of the Writing Together Program. She joined the WCC in January of 2026. Briana is an MIT graduate student, who joined Distributed Robotics Laboratory (DRL) in September 2023 after receiving her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. She is an NSF Fellow, GEM Fellow, and a School of Engineering Distinguished Graduate Student Fellow. At the DRL, she is currently working on understanding and simulating the light-matter interactions and the associated physical properties for materials in different phases.

Madison Taylor Hobbs/ WCC Fellow / mthobbs@mit.edu

Madison Taylor Hobbs is a WCC Fellow, working as part of the Writing Together Program. She joined the WCC in January of 2026. She is a graduate student in Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT working to improve communication reliability in hypersonic vehicles. She joined the Hypersonics Research Laboratory in January 2025 and hopes to combine her experience from SpaceX in computational structural modeling and knowledge of mechanics of materials with hypersonic flow research. Madison graduated with Distinction from Harvey Mudd College, earning a Bachelor of Science in Applied Dynamics with a concentration in Classics and honors in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.