Biography: Allison was born and raised in Hamilton, Canada. She attended McMaster University and earned a B.S. in Chemistry with summa cum laude honors in June 2017. During her undergraduate studies, Allison worked with Professor Harald Stöver to synthesize stimuli responsive polymers for applications in cell encapsulation. She then joined Professor Craig Hawker’s group in 2015 and 2016 for two internships. In her time in the Hawker group, Allison worked under the mentorship Dr. Jimmy Lawrence and Dr. Jing Ming Ren and helped develop strategies to obtain discrete oligomers and tacticity controlled functional polymers. Afterwards, she moved to Tsukuba, Japan to work at the National Institute of Materials Science with Professor Mitsuhiro Ebara to create new materials for hemodialysis. In Fall 2017, Allison returned to UCSB to conduct her graduate studies in chemistry under the co-supervision of Professor Craig Hawker and Professor Javier Read de Alaniz.

Research: Allison's research under Craig Hawker and Javier Read de Alaniz uses synthetic chemistry to develop stereospecific polymers and study of their unique properties. Specific areas of interest include the self-assembly of tacticity controlled polymers and dynamic materials via stereocomplexation.