Hi penpals and friends of SSP! As many of you know, Stanford Science Penpals started a little over 3 years ago. We began as a team of two frist-year graduate students and we ran a single penpal exchange with a school in Texas. Since then, our leadership team has more than tripled and we are now working with seven schools across the US. Stanford Science Penpals has grown a lot since we started. Our hope is that we can keep growing and improving our program. To facilitate this

Fiona Tamburini is a graduate student in the Genetics PhD program at Stanford. Fiona studies how the microbes that live in our bodies - the “microbiome” - impact our health. In this post, Fiona shares her journey toward becoming a scientist and how she became interested in genetics and microbiology research. I often wish that I had a neat little narrative about why I became a scientist. It would be so convenient to point to a particular moment in time, like a memory of a chil