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Becky has heard the siren song of many careers. While she has a deep abiding love for precision, a pet peeve is when academics are deep to the exclusion of ‘wide’. No, that’s not a size joke, we mean breadth of knowledge and perspective. She deeply enjoys the opportunity to indulge in dilettantism, luxuriating unconstrained in multiple genres. She and her family in Pennsylvania live the nerdy life many dreamt of as youngsters. Any day now, she will recover from her doctoral education.
Her specific white whale, if any, is weaponized ignorance. Her catch phrase, if she has one, is ‘That’s an empirical question.”
Becky Robare
Writer. Neuroscientist.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” – John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, Boston 1911
A trained neuroscientist and research analyst, Becky was raised on Star Trek and Doctor Who, and has filled her adult life with fandom. Inspired by her hero, Mr. Spock, Becky pursued a scientific education and earned her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2010 (her published works include Semi-supervised learning for connectionist networks, among others). She fled academia for greener pastures shortly thereafter. Her jobs have included camp counseling, cognitive simulation building, sci-fi writing, lab equipment handling, library book shelving, and kitchen dishwashing, all of which showcase her experience and versatility.
On the esoteric side of things, Becky has performed as “Brad” and a number of other characters in NYC’s Rocky Horror Picture Show shadowcast, served on the panels and sometimes as track head for Philcon, the US’s oldest continuing science-fiction conference, and has additionally worked for Dorian’s Parlor, indulging the need for archaic, glamorous clothing in us all, and that’s certainly come into play in at least one panel. Time and experience have made her work and her writing a major focus at Philcon and elsewhere, where she has delved into the real questions that lurk in the minds of we mere mortals. For example: do vampire-cyborgs dream of electric blood? She’s also perfectly qualified to answer your questions on the deep-seated roots of heroes’ desires and phobias. (But don’t send your dragons for therapy — she’s not licensed!)
In the time since she left neuroscience for a job as an analyst for a media company, Becky has come to work in research as a medical writer for the ECRI (formerly the Emergency Care Research Institute), a medical research non-profit. She revels in having a day job that combines her favorite things: writing and scientific study. Becky continues to head and participate in panels on the convention circuit along the East Coast in-between raising Jedi twins with her family outside of Philadelphia. You can read her on her Twitter feed. To dub her a “subtle force-multiplier” in most genre- and scene-related projects she’s undertaken, is only fair, given her numerous accomplishments outside of “fandom”. In short, Dr. Robare is published, experienced, and ready for action.