Cara Battersby is our Director of Communication and Development and she didn’t realize school was supposed to end and just keeps coming back. She received her PhD in astrophysics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and is now an assistant professor of physics at the University of Connecticut. She spends a lot of her time studying how stars are born in the center of our Galaxy, developing a new mission with NASA (in spaaaace!), and secretly wants to be Carl Sagan when she grows up. Cara believes equal access to education is the recipe for a better world.
Stephanie Keep is our Director of Content Development and jack of all trades, with a masters in evolutionary biology from Harvard, and a decade of experience with educational publishing, curriculum development, and assessment. Seriously, she is like the free spot on the “science education” bingo card, she’s done it all. She collaborates with scientists and teachers, or as she would say “researchers and educators, they’re all scientists!”
Erica Palma Kimmerling is our Director of Operations and holds a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Tufts and is now a Hellman Fellow in Science and Technology Policy at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (#fancy). Besides doing research on infectious and hereditary kidney diseases (yawn), she has played a major leadership role in ComSciCon for the past three years. Being treated on your birthday to one of Erica’s cupcakes will fool you into thinking this whole “one year older, one year wiser thing” is worth it.
Shannon Morey is our Director of Education and resident teacher (so you know we’re not a bunch of hacks), rocking high school physics, robotics and coding at Abbott Lawrence Academy in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Shannon also boasts a Master’s degree in chemistry from MIT and a number of leadership roles in science education, including her work co-founding and co-leading ComSciCon. Shannon is the master of doing it all — you know you’ve done well in life if you ever get invited to her house for one of her “oh it’s not big deal” 3-course dinners and yes, of course, she also made dessert!
