Melissa Pandika is a San Francisco Bay Area-based journalist who has covered a broad range of topics, including health, food, race, identity, immigration and social justice. In her writing, she seeks to illuminate narratives about communities that often go untold. Her news and feature stories, as well as her personal essays, have appeared in Discover, VICE, the Los Angeles Times, Bon Appétit’s Healthyish, New York Magazine’s The Cut and SELF, among other outlets. Before making the leap to journalism, Melissa investigated how aggressive brain tumors evade drugs that block the growth of their blood vessels as a research associate at the University of California, San Francisco. She holds a B.A. in molecular and cell biology from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.A. in communications from the Stanford Graduate School of Journalism, where she won the Nicholas Roosevelt Environmental Journalism Award. She is at work on a memoir.
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