Alyson has long been interested in performance, music, verbal art, pedagogy and aesthetics. As an undergraduate at Occidental College, she majored in Comparative Literature with a focus on Greek tragedy, and also completed a Music major in Violin Performance. After two years in the post-baccalaureate Classics program at UCLA, Alyson came to Stanford to continue studying Classical languages and literary culture. Her dissertation, entitled The Somatics of Style: The Body in Ancient Greek Theories of Verbal Art, explores the centrality of the physical body to conceptualizations of literary language and style in Graeco-Roman antiquity. She successfully passed her dissertation defense in January 2020. Since coming to Stanford, she has also enjoyed a wide range of teaching experience, from Greek Mythology to New Testament Greek and Intermediate Classical Greek. She has served as a teaching consultant for the Center for Teaching and Learning, as the graduate representative and faculty liaison for the Classics department, and as producer and president of Stanford Classics in Theater (SCIT). She is the current recipient of the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund Fellowship, and was also the recipient of the Pigott Scholars Program Fellowship.

In the summer of 2020, Alyson will take up a position as an instructor at Stanford's Summer Session Program.