Alysia Patterson Mueller, Patch Staff

<b>E-mail: alysia.patterson&#64;patch.com</b>

<b>Phone: 617-895-6650</b>

<b>Hometown: York, Pennsylvania</b>

<b>Birthday: January 14, 1984</b>

Boston is the 9th place Alysia has called home in as many years. She graduated in 2006 from Penn State University with degrees in international politics and English. She studied art and art history in the Umbria region of Italy and also earned a minor in French.

Following a brief stint working for a publishing company in Pennsylvania, she was employed by the French government as an English teaching assistant. She was posted to Nice, France where she taught English at a French boarding school for a year.

She returned to the U.S. in 2007 and moved to Chicago where she began studying toward a master&#39;s degree in journalism at Northwestern University. She worked as a reporter-in-residence at K24 -- a 24-hour news channel in Nairobi, Kenya, in the wake of the country&#39;s post-election violence in 2008. She covered the food crisis, violence against women and the controversial South African ban on elephant culling.

Afterwards, she moved to Washington D.C. to finish up her master&#39;s degree at Northwestern&#39;s D.C. campus. She went on to work as a video assistant for Associated Press Television News at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver and the 2008 Presidential Elections in D.C. 

In 2009 she was hired as a reporter in the Denver bureau of the Associated Press. She was later offered another job as a reporter at the AP&#39;s bureau in Raleigh. Her articles have been published by national and international news organizations, including <i>The Washington Post</i>, abcNews.com, MSNBC.com and the Sunday print edition of <i>The New York Times</i>.

In August she married her husband, Matt, an Air Force captain who just returned from a year-long deployment in Iraq. They live in a loft in South Boston.

<b>Beliefs</b><br>At Patch, we promise always to report the facts as objectively as possible and otherwise adhere to the principles of good journalism. However, we also acknowledge that true impartiality is impossible because human beings have beliefs. So in the spirit of simple honesty, our policy is to encourage our editors to reveal their beliefs to the extent they feel comfortable. This disclosure is not a license for writers to inject beliefs into stories or to dictate coverage according to them. In fact, the intent is the opposite: we hope that the knowledge that our beliefs are on the record will cause us to be ever mindful of writing, reporting and editing in a fair, balanced way. And if you ever see evidence that we failed in this mission, please let us know.<br><br><b>Politics </b><br><i>I&#39;m a registered Democrat in my home state of Pennsylvania but don&#39;t identify strongly with any political party. </i>

<b>Religion</b><br><i> I was raised Catholic.</i>

<b>Hot button issues</b>

<i>The hot button issues in Beacon Hill revolve around maintaining the quality of life in this amazing, historic neighborhood. Trash pick-up and littering, parking, zoning and licensing and development are all big issues for Beacon Hill residents. But a lot of the news in the neighborhood is a byproduct of how enjoyable life is in this community. Dining, arts, culture and economic development all feature prominently in the news of the day.</i>

<i>Over the next few years the Beacon Hill Civic Association and its negotiations with Suffolk University to abandon buildings on the Hill and move into the Downtown Crossing area will be a major topic of interest. In addition, the redesign of the Longfellow Bridge will prove an impossible-to-ignore project for most Beacon Hillers.</i>