Please Welcome Alex Williams, Greg Ferenstein, Christine Ying And TechCrunch Interns Billy Gallagher And Natalie Swope

You may have noticed some new bylines popping up these past couple of days. You’re not hallucinating! We’ve quietly made several new additions to the TechCrunch roster this summer and hiring continues to be our first priority across all departments.

In addition to specialist writers like Alex Williams and Greg Ferenstein, we’ve added a couple of interns and a rockstar product manager to our team. We’re also busy with other parts of the company, adding more people to our events team, and working on important but unglamorous projects like getting the site to load faster (hallelujah).

Here’s the latest on the newest folks we’ve got working here, and why you might want to talk to each of them.

Gregory Ferenstein is a technology journalist and educator. At TechCrunch, he writes about the intersection of technology and politics, education and any other way the Internet changes the traditional way we organize. As an educator, he has taught every age, from elementary school to college, and does academic research on curricula. He also holds a Master’s in Mathematical Behavioral Science. In his free time, he’s an avid Cross-fitter and does Capoeira, an acrobatic Brazilian martial art. Email contact here.

Alex Williams is a veteran technology blogger, journalist and analyst. He led the cloud and enterprise channels at ReadWriteWeb before joining SiliconAngle, where he worked as a senior editor. As our new enterprise writer, he’ll cover the rise of the Web, mobile and the cloud as the key drivers in organizations shift to a more consumer-oriented work environment. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and has worked as journalist, blogger and producer since 1989 with various stints in marketing, community management and event development. Alex has a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Northwestern University and a B.A. in French Literature from the University of Denver. He got his start in journalism when he wrote about his experience as a college student playing baseball in France. Email contact here.

Christine Ying is TechCrunch’s new product manager, responsible for its web products. She has worked as a software engineer, product manager and product marketer for NASA, Oracle, Visto and most recently Yahoo. There, she helped launch its iPad magazine, Livestand, and worked on Yahoo! Maps, Upcoming and other popular products. She has a B.S. in Computer Science from MIT, and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Billy Gallagher is our editorial intern this summer, helping us to cover the Silicon Valley startup scene. He’s also the president and editor in chief of The Stanford Daily, leading the student paper this coming fall after having been a managing editor of news for the past two volumes. He’s on track to graduate from Stanford University with a B.A. in Economics in 2014. Email contact here.

Natalie Swope is our intern this summer via AOL Tech. A junior at the University of California, Davis, she is majoring in computer engineering and minoring in technology management. An active blogger at reference site hackcollege.com and at her personal blog, swopeswope.com, Natalie also won the internship through her social media prowess, by collecting the most votes on her about.me page.