Alvitta Ottley
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Alvitta Ottley

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Alvitta Ottley didn't plan to become a computer scientist. She certainly didn't plan to become a professor. And she never planned to write books about uncertainty. Yet, uncertainty is the thread that ties them all together.

Through reflective nonfiction, she explores the moments that rarely make it into résumés or success stories: changing direction without a plan, feeling out of place, making difficult decisions, and discovering that the life you imagined may not be the life you ultimately build. Rather than offering formulas or easy answers, her books invite readers to think more deeply about the assumptions, advice, and stories that shape our choices.

By day, Alvitta is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, where she studies how people make decisions under uncertainty and designs technology that works more naturally with human thinking. By night, she writes about what uncertainty feels like from the inside.

She is the author of Local Optimization: Lessons From an Unplanned Path and Letters to a Young Researcher. Although one career is grounded in science and the other in storytelling, both are driven by the same question: How do we move forward when we don't know what's next?
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