WashU Medicine: Breakthrough Science. Human Stories. (2024–Present)

Healthcare marketing needs more than good storytelling right now. It needs to rebuild trust.

We're in a strange time for communications. People are searching for help in a world crowded with misinformation, AI-generated scams, and promises that are too good to be true.

That makes factual, clear, science-based storytelling more important than ever.

At WashU Medicine, the work often begins with complex research, clinical details, faculty interviews or institutional priorities. But the real assignment is more human: help people understand what the science means, why it matters, and why they can actually trust it.

In today's landscape, that matters to me.

As a senior copywriter at WashU Medicine, I develop creative concepts, messaging, and copy across research, patient care, medical education, recruitment, philanthropy, and institutional storytelling.

My work supports WashU Medicine and its partners, including Siteman Cancer Center, St. Louis Children's Hospital, and Barnes-Jewish Hospital. Across these organizations, I contribute to creative marketing efforts spanning campaigns, websites, social media, magazines, video, email, direct mail, donor communications, and recruitment.

I'm also closely involved in production, from developing video concepts and scripts to interviewing subjects, supporting shoots, and collaborating with designers, illustrators, editors, and local production partners and vendors.

Our subject matter ranges from Alzheimer's disease and cancer immunology to physician-scientist training and the impact of philanthropy. Much of my role starts with a dense brief, scientific research, an interview transcript, or a mountain of institutional information and finding the clearest, most human way to tell the story.

Selected works

Outlook Magazine: Medical research and long-form storytelling
I write feature and editorial content for Outlook, WashU Medicine's annual magazine. My work includes translating highly specialized research into engaging stories for broad audiences and writing about internationally recognized physicians and scientists. For Meet the Investigators, I profiled eight BJC Investigators working across neuroimmunology, neuroscience, virology, mitochondrial biology, and genome science, including National Academy of Medicine member Jonathan Kipnis and HHMI Investigator Dave Pagliarini. The feature carries my byline in the Autumn 2025 issue.

The Climb to Find a Cure for Alzheimer's: Turning decades of research into one visual story
I synthesized 17+ years of Alzheimer's research and clinical trial progress into a single-page visual explainer developed for Randall Bateman, MD, a leading Alzheimer's researcher whose work has been featured by The New York Times and CBS News Sunday Morning. I developed the mountain-climbing concept and worked closely with a talented senior illustrator to turn a complex network of studies and active trials into a story general audiences could follow.

Video and production: Bringing the WashU Medicine experience to life
I concept and script video content across recruitment, education, and institutional storytelling, working through production from early creative development to interviews, shoots, and postproduction. That includes a campus tour video series designed to give prospective students an authentic look at WashU Medicine and St. Louis, admissions videos featuring faculty and school leadership, and research-focused video storytelling. It also includes an ongoing pharmacology video series that translates complex research and the work of individual scientists into focused, accessible stories.

Social media: Building the voice behind the channels
My work extends beyond writing individual posts. I develop social media writing standards, voice and tone guidance, platform conventions, and content strategy that help teams tell more consistent stories across WashU Medicine channels. I also concept and write content around research discoveries, faculty expertise, student experiences, and institutional milestones.

Recruitment and medical education: Making complex programs easy to understand
I develop recruitment and admissions communications for prospective medical students, physician-scientists, occupational therapy students, residents, fellows, and physicians. My work includes website copy, brochures, email, video, messaging frameworks, and recruitment tools. For the Medical Scientist Training Program, founded by Roy Vagelos, MD, I help translate a complex MD/PhD training model into clear communications about how WashU Medicine prepares physician-scientists to move between patient care and the laboratory.

Donor communications: Connecting philanthropy to human impact
I concept and write fundraising and stewardship communications across direct mail, email, donor appeals, and impact reports. The work includes Alzheimer's disease, cancer research, scholarships, medical education, and individual physician-scientist stories. Whether the audience is a longtime donor or a first-time giver, the goal is to connect complex work to a clear reason to care and give.

Research milestones and data visualization: Finding the story in the numbers
I regularly work through large amounts of scientific and institutional information to identify the proof points that matter most. For a WashU Medicine research timeline, I distilled more than 130 years of medical discovery into six defining milestones. The concept's success led Siteman Cancer Center to request a similar treatment focused on more than 25 years of cancer research and clinical progress.

Brand messaging: Building a clearer story from the ground up

For WashU Medicine Occupational Therapy, I helped develop a comprehensive messaging framework designed to clarify the program's positioning and create a more consistent voice across recruitment and marketing communications. The work required synthesizing interviews, program information, audience needs, and institutional priorities into a practical messaging system teams could actually use. I developed core messaging, audience-specific language, proof points, and voice guidance, then applied the framework across a major website refresh and other recruitment communications.

Client: WashU Medicine
Role: Senior Copywriter
Date: 2024–Present