Activator • Innovator • Collaborator • Educator • Cheerleader for the Greater Good
HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN
Educator * Cheerleader for the Greater Good
At the heart of everything I do is one central theme: empowerment through empathy. This theme is threaded throughout my journey, from building team-based learning modules as a tenure-track
professor at University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, to piloting an online employee feedback system as a civil rights leader, to pulling together a cadre of experts to collectively build an international captive wildlife emergency preparedness fusion center, to drawing on employee input to build and beta test an intranet for a 100,000 person organization. As a fangirl for the power of raucous discussion, divergent thoughts, the-more-minds-the-better, and rolling up your sleeves to get your hands dirty, I know that the customers--the student, the zookeeper, the fire fighter, the customer service rep--are all dreamers and builders when the power within them is harnessed to craft a new direction that could change all of our lives for the better.
ONE USDA INTRANET
Five Weeks of Feedback Campaign, 2019
As Chief Customer Officer, I oversaw the journey from concept to design to beta launch of the all-employee One USDA Intranet. At the center of the Intranet is the USDA employee, as we built the site using data from a 5-week campaign where employees participated in a survey a week covering a different theme: Connected, Proud, Supported, Unified, Celebrated.
We had over 16,000 surveys and over 100,000 data points, which helped us incorporate into the design an understanding of and prioritization for what and how employees wanted to hear from the Department.
As a result of the campaign, over 75 employees volunteered to user-test our site at beta launch, which further enabled us to craft a site of value for employees.
TEAM BASED LEARNING
Avian Medicine Course, University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, 2009
Student engagement in their own learning was a key strategy for me as tenure-track Assistant Professor and Director of the Exotic Companion Animal Medicine and Surgery Service at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. Just a few years post-graduation from veterinary school, I knew all too well how little school had prepared me for the life-and-death of being a veterinarian. I wanted my students to be able to independently apply their scientist brains and hearts to any situation, no matter how novel or stressful. No amount of didactic lecturing, rote memorization, or multiple-choice exams were going to prepare them to do this. Piloting team-based learning techniques in the third-year elective Avian Medicine Course (for which over 75% of the students signed up) gave them an opportunity to build skill sets that would actually be required once they graduate: pull from your resources (written and human) to empower you to make sound decisions that could save the life of your patient, whether furred, finned, scaled, or feathered.
