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Inspiring people to live more sustainability is a complex, interdisciplinary challenge, but one that I’m prepared to meet thanks to my training in the Learning Sciences. While at UW-Madison, I designed virtual environments for people to grapple with environmental situations that were too expensive, dangerous, or complicated to deal with in real life. Using Land Science, people began making connections between their personal decisions and the impacts on social, environmental, and economic systems. In my role as Manager of Environmental Sustainability Education and Engagement at the California Academy of Sciences, I use my knowledge of how people learn about complex systems and my skills in designing and evaluating experiences to tap into people’s values and identities in order to inspire them to take individual and collective actions that sustain our global food, water, and energy systems.

While at UW’s Learning Sciences program, I was focused on designing interactions between learners, software, mentors, and peers to provide opportunities for the developmental and measurement of professional ways of thinking — complexes of understanding, justifications, and identity often overlooked in traditional testing. This has helped me immensely in by current role as Director of Assessment for Kidaptive, an early learning educational analysis company. At Kidaptive we are building an adaptive, personalized, learning environment that brings together detailed analysis of what learners are engaged in during digital and non-digital challenges with learner competency models, based on individual and group performances, to provide young learners with optimal levels of challenge in digital games and activities with parents. The experience of being immersed in the theoretical, technical, and measurement aspects of learning and assessment during my time int he Learning Sciences program was invaluable in helping prepare me for a role working with software engineers, business developers, and psychometricians to build a learning platform that helps kids and their grownups around the world.