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Cara Giaimo '11 -- Staff Writer, Atlas Obscura
Cara is a staff writer for Atlas Obscura, where she covers everything from blimps to woggins. Although she will write about almost anything, her favorite stories focus on where science intersects with history, politics, and culture. She used to be the language correspondent for Autostraddle, and has written for Technology Review, CASE Magazine, and the Boston Hassle. She received her MS in science writing from MIT in 2015, and now lives in Somerville with her partner, Lilia Kilburn '12.


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Amir Denzel Hall '17 -- Graduate Design Assistant
Amir is a son, brother, friend, writer and performance artist currently working as the Graduate Design Assistant at Amherst College.He explores the self in his writing and performance work as a permeable membrane by considering how we construct ourselves and our stories with each other, through multiple frames of seeing and memory. An obsession with Love emerges in his work as the substance that opens and as the creative essence, much like storytelling, that renders a person immortal.


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Nicole Heig '04 – Certified Nurse Midwife (CNM)
I graduated from Amherst in 2004 majoring in Women’s and Gender Studies with a general plan to work in reproductive health policy. I luckily found myself in an Americorps program doing doula work and pregnancy education in a small community health center and fell in love with the idea of doing direct patient care instead. I obtained a Master of Science in Nursing from Yale in 2009 and have been providing full-scope midwifery care in a hospital setting since. I also work at Planned Parenthood as a per diem clinician providing gynecologic and abortion care.

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Ada Lerner '09 – Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Dr. Ada Lerner '09 is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Wellesley College. Their scholarly work is broadly within the area of Computer Security and Privacy, using a variety of user-, systems-, and measurement-based methods to study the ways in which security and privacy can benefit all people. As such, their work often focuses on the needs of marginalized groups, such as LGBTQ+ people and refugees, or on groups which play critical roles in our free society, such as lawyers and journalists. They received their PhD from the University of Washington in Seattle, but are glad to be back in Massachusetts, just across the state from Amherst.

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Christopher Lim '12 – PhD Candidate at Yale University
Chris Lim is a PhD student at Yale University in the Department of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry. After graduating from Amherst in 2012, Chris spent two years teaching physics and chemistry at Collegiate School in Richmond, VA. In 2014, Chris joined the Xiong lab at Yale, where he studies how HIV proteins hijack cellular processes to benefit the virus, primarily using structural techniques such as x-ray crystallography. After noticing a need in the STEM community at Yale, Chris founded the graduate chapter of Out in STEM (oSTEM), part of a national organization dedicated to fostering community among LGBTQ+ scientists. Outside of lab, Chris is a graduate Teaching Fellow at the Center for Teaching and Learning, and serves as a mentor for the BioMed SURF Program at Yale, an undergraduate research opportunity geared towards underrepresented minority students in STEM.

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Jxhn Martin - Director of the Queer Resource Center
Jxhn serves as the director of the Queer Resource Center (QRC), whose primary role on campus is to support queer* and trans students throughout their journey at Amherst (*queer is used here as an umbrella term for the LGBTQ+ community). Jxhn works to bring change to campus through community building, stemming from programming, queer/trans inclusivity trainings, to policy implementation and beyond. Reach out to them regarding how to navigate resources on campus, to schedule a training, ask questions concerning collaborative programming with the QRC, and/or booking the QRC space. In their free time, you can find them talking about desirability politics, affects/effects of student debt, and/or some combination of Netflixing, eating, cooking, or attempting to bake.