Silhouette of a human head and shoulders.

Elissa Welle

Former reporter
The Transmitter

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Elissa Welle was a news reporter for The Transmitter from 2023 to 2024, where she covered neurodegeneration and a smorgasbord of other basic neuroscience research. Before joining the newsroom in late 2023, she worked as an intern reporter for Reuters, Nature, STAT News and The Detroit Free Press. She has also written for The Chronicle of Higher Education and her alma mater’s student newspaper, The Michigan Daily. Her days as a scientist were spent designing and fabricating tiny electrodes for single-neuron electrophysiology recordings.

From this contributor

Image of inhibitors that block the interaction of two memory molecules in mice.
Memory

Persistent protein pairing enables memories to last

By Elissa Welle
17 July 2024 | 5 min read
Research image of data from electrode arrays inserted into mice.
Electrophysiology

10 standards for brain electrode-array recordings enhance reproducibility

By Elissa Welle
12 July 2024 | 5 min read
Portrait of Kaspar Podgorski standing in his lab wearing a helmet with a climbing rope over his shoulder.
Neural dynamics

Climbing to new heights: Q&A with Kaspar Podgorski

By Elissa Welle
21 June 2024 | 8 min read
Image of amyloid beta plaques.
Alzheimer’s disease Microphone

Reviving ‘inside-out’ hypothesis of amyloid beta to explain Alzheimer’s mysteries

By Elissa Welle
29 May 2024 | 8 min read
New method reignites controversy over brain clearance during sleep.
Glymphatic system

New method reignites controversy over brain clearance during sleep

By Elissa Welle
22 May 2024 | 8 min read

Education

  • M.S. in science journalism, University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, University of Michigan
  • B.S. in bioengineering, Cornell University

Fellowships

  • AAAS Mass Media Fellowship in 2022

Articles

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Research image of human thalamus.
Spectrum

Autism-linked genes expressed in thalamus make an impact, and more

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Illustration of differing lines of data.
Reproducibility

Eighteen teams analyzed the same neurophysiology dataset—and got wildly different answers

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