Alumna Spotlight: Allison Treloar '80
Throughout her life, Allison Treloar ’80 has always tried to live by one important rule.
Never stop learning.
“I’m the kind of person that likes to go after opportunities, and I guess I’ve always been like that,” Treloar said recently from her home in Corrales, New Mexico.
Whether she was choosing a high school, pursuing a job, or moving across the country, Treloar, has stayed true to that belief, and she is not changing anytime soon.
A few months after competing at the 2024 Veteran Fencing World Championships in Dubai for fencers over the age of 60, she remains eager to reach new heights in the sport.
“I’ve set the bar, now I need to raise the bar for the next worlds competition,” Treloar said. “I want to be on that podium at the next worlds competition. That’s my goal.”
In middle school, that type of mindset brought her to Randolph Road and Mercy.
After deciding she needed more of a challenge, she went to her parents and made a case for Mercy.
“I really liked what I saw, and I applied to Mercy [in eighth grade], and it was absolutely the school for me,” Treloar said. “It was academically rigorous, and I met people from different parts of the world, and I got to be part of a lot of clubs and activities and shows.”
For Treloar, who was part of the crew for Fiddler on the Roof and a few other productions, the challenges and opportunities Mercy provided were exactly what she was looking for after middle school. And she has never stopped searching for those opportunities, especially in the fields of science. Upon graduating from Mercy, Treloar headed to New Haven, where she spent nearly a decade as both a student and a researcher.
“I was always interested in science basically from the beginning and talking with my pediatrician,” Treloar said.
Treloar attended Albertus Magnus as an undergraduate, where she double majored in Chemistry and Biology; and Southern Connecticut State University as a graduate student, where she got her master’s in biology, while also working at a neuroanatomy laboratory at the Yale School of Medicine.
“I knew I always wanted to work in a research laboratory,” Treloar said. “I was really pulled toward medicine and at that time, the neuroanatomy job was open, and I took that. I tried to leave myself open to learning as much as I could, and I still do that now.”
At Yale, she got the chance to work alongside the future President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Susan Hockfield, and while working in the lab, Yale paid for her master’s degree from Southern Connecticut State and helped set her up for the rest of her life.
“I had a lot of opportunities at Yale,” Treloar said.
One of those opportunties?
A chance to work at one of the most famous laboratories of the last 100 years, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, in New York, where she helped run a class [antibodies as molecular probes of the nervous system] with Hockfield.
“It was two weeks of science camp that was incredibly entertaining and valuable,” Treloar said. “I was meeting a lot of scientists who did a lot of the seminal work in antibodies and molecular biology, and I was teaching people how to use the techniques that we were using in our laboratory.”
She went on to meet James Watson, the American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist, who proposed the double helix structure of the DNA molecule with Francis Crick, and Barbara McClintock, the American scientist and cytogeneticist who also won the Nobel Prize in Science and Medicine.
Meeting legends, working in a hotbed of intelligence and ambition – it was dream for the Mercy graduate.
“I was just trying to learn as much as I could,” Treloar said. “I was taking in what I was seeing and asking questions of the other scientists about their work. I was just incredibly grateful for these opportunities.”
At Cold Spring Harbor, she was exposed to the starting line-up of key players in molecular biology, too, and it quickly gave her direction.
"I was looking around and there happened to be an opening at Bristol Meyers Squibb in Wallingford and I worked there for about 12 years [after Yale]," Treloar said.
The change to a global biopharmaceutical company was what she called a ‘180-degree difference from academic research,’ but Treloar felt lucky to get into a laboratory which focused on transgenics, the process of altering an organism’s genome by introducing foreign DNA from another species.
“I learned what it was like to be part of a very focused program,” Treloar said. “We were providing animal models to test therapeutic pharmaceutical candidates.”
It was a different experience but Treloar liked it, and soon enough, it was time to start a family.
Treloar and her husband, Dr. John Alsobrook, have two children, their daughter Galen, and their son, Ian, and about 25 years ago, the four moved out West to Corrales, New Mexico, when her husband got a job opportunity with a clinical diagnostics start-up.
He came home one day, and he said, 'what do you think about moving out west?’ and I said 'let’s go,’” Treloar said.
Never willing to shy away from an opportunity, Treloar packed up her family and moved over 2,000 miles to a town just north of Albuquerque.
“We love it because it is a close-knit agriculture village and my husband is on the village council,” Treloar said.
In New Mexico, Treloar has worked at the University of Mexico; a clinical diagnostic laboratory company; and at the state of New Mexico Scientific Laboratory as the Director of Quality, Safety, Secrurity, and preparedness.
"I don’t like to dwell on successes,” Treloar said. “I’m always thinking, great, what’s next?”
For Treloar, what was "next" was the biggest job yet: a position with Sandia National Laboratories, where she finds herself traveling the world and helping laboratories secure their biological materials and protect them from agents of harm.
“I’ve been to a lot of places around the world, helping laboratories develop systems and procedures to secure their materials from people who want to get them and use them for no good,” Treloar said. “I’ve been to Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, West Africa and East Africa – almost every continent. About 50 percent of my time is travel.”
It is a lot, but it is also a career-defining position.
“This is really the sum of all my experiences and skills,” Treloar said. “I really feel like I’m making a difference in lab operations around the world.”
What happens when she is done?
After saying she would like to work for another five years, Treloar jokes that when she retires ‘she just wants to fence.’ And can you blame her?
Over the last 25 years, she has gone from trying fencing again at a recreation class in Madison to the Veteran World Championships in the United Arab Emirates.
“It was a summer adult recreation class, and I did pretty well,” Treloar said. “I said “well, what do I next?”
Treloar first picked up the sport in college, when she took it for a physical education credit, but despite enjoying it immensely, she only returned to it after having kids.
After that recreation class, Treloar quickly found a club and some local tournaments and before she knew it she was trying it nationally in the veterans division for fencers above the age of 40.
“That was it,” Treloar said. “I was hooked.”
She has now competed in over 60 national competitions for veterans, and this year she made the world championship in the women’s 60 foil for the for the first time.
“I felt like this year I had done my best to make the [worlds] team, and I really wanted to do well,” Treloar said. “I just didn’t want to be glad to make the tournament, I wanted to do well, and I found out how incredibly difficult it was.”
Despite all the distractions that come with a worlds competition, Treloar competed well in Dubai. She completed the preliminary pools competition in 11th place and finished in 19th place overall. And during the championship, she also celebrated her 33rd wedding anniversary.
