Nailed it, except for the bagels

It's easy to feel a little lost and fairly incompetent when diving into a new field. But if there's one thing I know I can deliver, it's a costume to match a theme. Between the networking and literature deep dives, I made the time to pop by New York for a classic Sharon soirée, the likes of which had often drawn me to London back in my Brighton days. Much to my surprise, this turned out to be Sharon's very first party stateside since her move over the pond several years back, as she hadn't been based in Manhattan until just a few months prior. What a privilege to be part of her very first US guest list! She hosted a fantasy-ren-faire-themed birthday/Halloween get together, and (after perhaps a few too many Amazon returns), I nailed it. I am still not a fan of corsets and I don't understand how women tied themselves into these things for so many centuries. I'm glad it was just a half day of my life. The folks were fun, the hostess was as lovely as ever, her new place is both fabulous and fabulously located. (Did we expect anything less?) My biggest complaint is that I somehow trekked all the way up to New York and did not eat a single bagel. (And somehow had more than my fill of sourdough. What coast was this even??) I'm sure I'll have some time to correct that before this East Coast adventure is over.

Fantasy Ren Faire Halloween in NYC, with some pretty spectacular views and even more wonderful company. Collage also featuring some suburban Pennsylvanian lawn décor and authentic caramel apples.

Mid-career exploration adventure, leg 1

Leg 1 of my grand trek across the country on a quest to figure out if it's possible to teach an old dog new tricks (more specifically, whether a bioengineer can change specialization mid-career) began in Baltimore this week at the annual conference of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASMR). Here, I had to put on my shiniest, most network-y smile as I met loads of new folks, sold my story, and got their feedback on the state of the field and my potential fit in it.

I had a teensy bit of time for Baltimore tourism on Sunday after knocking out the scientific literature reading I'd selected for the day. And when you discover that the city is home to Yelp's 6th most highly rated ice cream shop in a list of America's top 100, how can you spend all day inside?

For more than a year and a half, I was the longest tenured woman on the technical staff at Neuralink. I've lived that leaky pipeline first hand, constantly the only woman in the room, not a single more senior female engineer to look up to as a role model in the office, and I'm absolutely sick of it. I've got some technical skills and I want to start putting them to use to level the playing field. In our thirties, women are the ones stuck paying the price for the family planning choices, and it's not easy: I've watched women drop out of awesome positions while their male counterparts forged ahead at pivotal moments in their career because it wasn't possible to achieve the work-life balance they'd need for parenthood and their biological clocks wouldn't allow them any more time. Meanwhile, our male counterparts have the luxury of picking a timeline (and a younger partner, as needed) to fit their career ambitions. And I've met women who tried to push out their clock only to be met with rude surprises: early menopause, failed IVF cycles, miscarriages, all of which we have to bear with our heads held high, hiding the physical burden while bringing our A-game to the work place. The problem is complex, and needs a variety of solutions, many extending far beyond the scope of a tech start-up or big pharma. Nonetheless, I think I can do something to lighten the burden for my sisters, to ease (or one day delete) women's biological clocks, and that's the direction I'd like to try to run.

The annual ASRM conference is attended by roughly 7000 participants. I put my best big girl networking shoes on and hit the ground running. And pretty consistently, the folks I met pleasantly surprised me with their enthusiasm to meet a female engineer who wanted to bring her technical skills and patient experience into the field.

There was plenty to learn and so many people from whom to gather ideas at ASRM. I met a neuroscientist specialized in sex-based differences in susceptibility to mental illness who'd gotten into fertility research (and clearly demonstrated the variable sperm quality from month to month that corresponds with men's stress levels). I met specialists in oncofertility who are able to cryopreserve women's ovarian tissue prior to cancer treatment and later reimplant this tissue to restore fertility after they're in remission and are ready to pursue a family. I learned that an embryo implanting inside a woman literally merges with the endometrial lining, so maternal and fetal cells combine, with nuclei from each human co-existing in single cells during the process of embryo implantation. I saw presentations from teams who are culturing patient-specific endometrial organoids to better understand issues around fertility and endometriosis. I learned that only seven clinics in the US offer third-trimester abortion care—yikes. I chatted with reps from companies who'd gotten me through my seven-cycle embryo-banking journey back in 2024 and learned more about the tech underlying it: I had no idea that company-specific variation in pre-implantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (PGT-A) results in higher rates of failed embryos at some testing facilities despite equal success rates in implantation. In other words, some companies' shortcomings result in the discarding of perfectly viable embryos. Cool. I learned that bovine embryos are a popular research tool, enough so that companies literally exist to market them to researchers. Apparently this is part of what has made Canada a strong hub for assistive reproductive technology (ART) research, namely their abundance of cows. And, excitingly for me given some of my potential future career prospects, I attended a talk from the inventor of PGT-A who listed in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) as one of the top five frontiers of IVF. Heck, yeah.

Miraculously, I actually found time (and energy!) for a mid-week sunrise run during the conference. With a half-marathon awaiting me in less than a month, I can't afford to slack off during these travels.

By the time I was bussing out of Baltimore yesterday evening, I was utterly exhausted and hardly able to concentrate on my leisure reading, forget the binders stuffed with scientific literature I'd packed. I spent half the bus ride relaxing into a silly medical sitcom on Netflix. This morning I hit LinkedIn bright and early, and the flurry of post-conference messaging began, with some excitingly supportive responses. I've still got the neurotech calls lined up for next week, and the future feels disconcertingly uncertain, but I'm hopeful I may make the leap into a new field, one where I can understand both the scientist/engineer and the patient perspective, and one where I truly believe in the product end goal. (Let's be honest, as scientifically satisfying as a brain-computer implant (BCI) may be, do you really want to see a world where every one of us is implanted? We're glued to our phones enough as is.)

For professional and financial reasons, many of us are postponing parenthood, but women's biology just isn't keeping pace with modern society. Maybe I can do my part to make it a bit less burdensome for women who want to have options on the same timelines as their male counterparts, to give them the freedom to change their minds and their life journey throughout their thirties (and maybe forties) depending on where life takes them. It feels like a pretty decent place to invest my energy.

Girls' week

Nico had to jet off to Montreal once again for work and I, well, don't have any. (Projects, yes, but that's another story.) It's not often I have some downtime to fill, so I invited my mom over to come take advantage of the Bay Area's most beautiful weather of the year for a week of unplanned chill. We walked—so much walking, we sought out specialty caffeinated drinks, we hit up the Berkeley Botanical Gardens, we split a volcanic bingsoo, we tested our knowledge at the Wolfhound's Wednesday trivia with friends, we ate sushi, we mini golfed and drank, we face masked, we went to the historic Grand Lake Theatre for a movie, and we hit up Sonoma for a boozy Saturday with a sampling of gator meat tots. (Can pescatarians eat reptiles? I did.) I squeezed in some studying and professional meetings in between the fun. We otherwise had no agenda or deadlines: very out of character for me, and probably overdue.

Mom came out for a girls' week while Nico was (mostly) off on business.

Kind words to close a chapter

No matter how many times you fantasize about how it will go, when it's finally time to say goodbye to a project to which you've given nearly a decade, it's never easy. But here's what I had to say on Monday.

Saying goodbye is never easy.

From there, the love kept pouring in all week. I'm not going to lie, it's been bittersweet. 

Taking the leap into the unknown is terrifying, even if it's time. I've got half a mind to think the next adventure I'm embarking on is completely insane, but if I'm not going to try it now, then when? So, I suppose, stay tuned.

She did, he did, I didn't

Last weekend, Colby officially joined the family and Hayley got a new last name. The entire event was absolutely beautiful and full of love, at least the parts of it I got to see. Work has been so horribly crazy lately that I found myself trapped in the car, tethered to my phone for wi-fi, praying that my battery didn't die, and sweating down my black-tie gown while desperately trying to coax Grok to write fast enough for me to not miss the entire wedding. After missing the ceremony, I stepped out for family photos, but got sucked in again and only emerged for real starting at the tail end of the cocktail hour. Everyone was beautiful, well-behaved, and even down for a cousins' hoe-down. I think it slipped into the background just how very lucky I am to be a part of the Aloia clan. This family really is a very special crew.

Hayley and Colby have tied the knot!

Bonjour Hi!

"Bonjour Hi", the typical greeting when entering any establishment in Montreal, positively tickled me. For the first time in my life, I discovered an outside world that linguistically mirrored our own household. The trip to Montreal was the first chance of many to discover a new city: Nico and I are fleshing out plans to make this our next big move (with a potential pit-stop in Texas if the fates align). California was never my thing — it feels like 8.5 years ago I borrowed someone else's West Coast dream just to try it on for size and the zipper's been stuck ever since. A city with European charm that lets me flex my French and brings us several time zones closer to the City of Lights? Sign me up. There are arts, there's culture, and there's plenty of winter for me to bitch about. There aren't the neurotech opportunities of the Bay, but I don't think I'll be looking back.

The goal this weekend was to scope out some potential neighborhoods. But in the end, the goal for me was mostly staying awake. A red eye at the end of a sleepless week of work didn't kick things off in the best manner, especially when our hotel check in wasn't until after 3pm. After a short nap, my vacation properly began around 5pm on Saturday and ended two hours later when a work emergency arose. I postponed putting out fires to finish dinner and test out Ripple, one of the top-rated ice cream shops (the chocolate raspberry and raspberry cheesecake pairing did not disappoint), but then I had to grind from 10pm until 3am, while my work colleagues were none the wiser of my international whereabouts. Sunday morning tea at 10:30am precluded fighting that 9am alarm clock, which meant the entire weekend was a blur of sleep deprivation. Nonetheless, meeting up with folks with whom we could just be honest about our lives — our plans to move, our hopes for children via carriers, our failed embryo transfer — was all so wonderfully refreshing in stark contrast to the folks who fill my days at work and aren't allowed to hear the first bit of all this.

A whirlwind ~30 hour first peek at our future home city, Montreal.

We haven't figured out where we want to live yet, but we know it's over there. What a wonderful chance to get to know the country that surprised me by claiming me as one of its own last December. I love that I now have a light at the end of the tunnel. I cannot wait.

Not to be

Her due date would have been May 7. She and Nico would have nearly been birthday twins. There would have been years of celebrating the pair of them together, of watching Daddy's little girl dictate the flavor of their joint birthday cakes, the same way Nico took over his big sister's birthday growing up.

This won't be our baby girl.

It took us seven cycles to make her. Our one, unique, perfectly scored female embryo. And that was it. That's all she'll ever be: a beautiful ball of cells, a reason that had made the full seven-cycle hellscape seem like it had been worth it And she's gone, and with it the hope, the light at the end of the tunnel.

I won't be a just-turned-40 kind of mom. I'll be a pushing-41 now, best case. It's so old, so selfish, so unfair to those poor future kids. If it happens at all. If we haven't just lit half a million dollars on fire for funsies.

The two weeks of hoping collapsed into a colossal headache around a normal chaotic workday. Brain implant technology can't wait for hearts to heal, and they don't care about how much sleep the engineers behind them might need to feel like functioning human beings. Instead of breaks to stare at the beautiful, single perfect bundle of cells that it had taken us seven cycles to make, I now get breaks to curl into a heap in vivarium hallways and sob into my facemask when no one is looking, hoping I don't accidentally swipe an eye with a gloved hand and rub Herpes B into my eyes.

Our fertility journey has been a story of swiping defeat from the jaws of victory: getting no-call PGT-A results on 4 of 23 embryos (expected in roughly 1% of tested embryos); seeing inexplicably high arrested development of embryos (up to 90% in one cycle, when the expectation is closer to 50%); taking seven cycles for what our doctor assured us would only need two, tops three. I'd ben thrilled to crawl out the other side at the end of 2024. I don't know why I'd expected the next stage to go any better, why I'd thought we could count on the stats: with a gestational carrier and a top-scored embryo, chances were better than not that we'd have that long-awaited pregnancy. As we've seen in our journey, the medical literature stats don't apply to us.