Black Pawn – Addie Ivanova

We thank Addie for her sacrifice in our chess game on Parliament.

Addie’s life is a chaotic chess middlegame, working for the nuclear regulator by day, and passing pawns by night. Having grown up playing the sport from a young age, she has nothing to show for it. Her chess game has seen mediocre success at best, but no shortage of enthusiasm. With her skills hovering somewhere between ‘I know the rules’ and ‘where did all my pieces go?’, she’s still determined to play. She recently returned from a year abroad studying radiation biology at Oxford, where she lived out her Hogwarts dream, prepping for the role of giant black pawn and couldn’t be more excited to actually be cast the part. With Alzheimer’s running in her family (thank you  for the genetic confirmation), she jumped on the opportunity to be on the front lines of an attack against this grandmaster of a disease, and defend her fellow (neuron) pieces. In an effort to combat her family history, she plays chess with her father (the iconic former uOttawa hot dog guy) as a father-daughter bonding activity, which unfortunately has done nothing for his hearing loss but hopefully is maintaining brain plasticity.