Alica grew up in figure skating and playing volleyball in Pennsylvania. She moved to Baltimore to attend Johns Hopkins University. While earning a degree in neuroscience, she became enthralled with nutrition, and independently pursued that knowledge alongside her formal studies. She helped start a program that taught elementary school children fun nutrition lessons while parents were at PTA meetings, and studied the effectiveness of nutrition education taught at local churches. Once she graduated, she found herself taking time off of her research assistant job to volunteer at local farms and in a Montessori school’s teaching kitchen. So she was thrilled to find the national nonprofit HealthCorps, which places young people in high schools around the country for two-year terms as health & wellness coordinators. During her HealthCorps tenure Alica taught lessons about nutrition, exercise, and mental resiliency as well as gardening and food systems, put on cafeteria demonstrations, built a hoop house, created an after-school cooking club, and hosted school-wide health fairs and staff wellness challenges.

At the end of her term she was recruited by The Institute for Integrative Health to design and build a program she had dreamt up in college. Five Times a Feast is a healthy and affordable cooking workshop series hosted at community hub sites around Baltimore, which now includes a local food focus. After successfully bringing the program to several community hubs, she set her sights on sustainability. Alica designed a program to train Five Times a Feast students to become teachers, and keep the program going on their own. Now she’s working on building a small business to offer her expertise and inspiration to families in the form of meal planning, personal cheffing, and in-home classes. In the moments when she’s not in the kitchen or at the farmers’ market, Alica is sure to be found riding her bike, doing yoga, hiking, or most likely playing beach volleyball.