Tessa McKenzie, MPH co-instructed the course during her time as the Community-Engaged Research Coordinator in the Division of Community Engagement at VCU. Tessa continues to use connected-learning strategies in her new role as Manager of Evidence-Based Decision-Making with Bridging Richmond, an educational equity partnership in Richmond, VA. She has a unique background in social epidemiology and her area of expertise focuses on bringing harmony across data silos to ask the right questions that reveal and heal social inequities. Tessa believes data is what brings us together. Through Tessa’s collaborative approach, she is working with public school districts to create a data-sharing culture with trust-building as a central tenet and major driver of change.
Laura Gogia
Laura Gogia, MD, PhD assisted in the design of Collaborative Curiosity and served as the first connected learning coach for the course. She is the Associate Director of the Grace E. Harris Leadership Institute (GEHLI) at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and an independent educational consultant specializing in mixed methods research, innovative digital learning designs, and alternative evaluation strategies. Recent scholarship has focused on community engaged scholarship, participant success, and systems-level evaluation in higher education. Laura earned her doctorate in Educational Research and Evaluation and medical degree from VCU. In a prior professional life, she was a women’s health provider in rural Virginia and continues to be a fierce advocate for clinical translational research, knowledge accessibility, and health and wellness.