Story Makers

Cristi has been a faculty member at Georgia Tech since 2018. Prior to that she was the Director of the Studio for Entrepreneurial Engineering Design at Lawrence Technological University. She has a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and an M.A. in Educational Studies. She worked in pharmaceutical product and process development before discovering her passion for influencing people. She thoroughly enjoys exploring ways to teach and mentor people to enhance their growth potential as engineers and educators.

Award-winning playwright and StoryReady Founder Janece Shaffer was invited to collaborate with Georgia Tech’s Department of Biomedical Engineering to create a signature storytelling curriculum, now required for all students. Janece has also designed and currently leads an innovative, yearlong story-based leadership program, KEEN on Stories, for nearly 100 engineering educators. As a playwright, she has penned more than a dozen works and through her company, she teaches storytelling strategies to clients like Delta Air Lines, Georgia Pacific, Georgia Power, and Emory University.

Joe is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He is a recipient of the National Academy of Engineering’s Bernard M. Gordon Prize in 2019 “for fusing problem-driven engineering education with learning science principles to create a pioneering program that develops leaders in biomedical engineering”. His current research interests are in engineering education with a focus on the social-cultural aspects of highly interactive problem-driven learning environments, including how they impact students’ motivation, engagement, and sense of belonging and inclusion.

Laura is a Professor of English and founding Director of the Center for Engaged Storycraft at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her research explores contemporary narrative practices in fiction, digital literatures, and emerging storytelling media and methods. She conducts interdisciplinary research on narrative and post-World War II sciences of cybernetics, information, and systems theory and more recent bioinformatic sciences, attending to the interplay between these sciences, their narrativization, and cultural understanding. Laura teaches Storytelling Across Media; Text and Code: Expressive Practices in Computational Media; Science Fiction; and a Transnational Digital Creation Workshop with the University of Paris-8.

Engineer, author, professor, facilitator, and artist, Kurt enjoys working with others to help them move their worlds in better directions. He is intrigued by engineering as a means for diplomacy, community innovation, and personal fulfillment. A first-generation college student, he earned three engineering degrees at the University of Iowa with an immensely supportive group of faculty and peers, and currently lives in Virginia with his amazing wife and daughters. His favorite part of each night for the past ten years has been story time with his kids.

Stacy is Director of Year One Programs at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her PhD is in History and she studies the memory and commemoration of the North American fur trade. Her work in Student Affairs creates opportunities for students to adapt to the culture and environment of higher education in ways that are developmentally appropriate and institutionally specific.

Kyle is an Associate Professor at James Madison University in the Department of Engineering. He has taught courses pertaining to topics for first-year engineering, materials science and engineering, engineering design, systems thinking and engineering leadership development. Currently, he holds the following positions within JMU: 1st/2nd Year Engineering Academic Advisor and a Center for Faculty Innovation Teaching Fellow. He has a PhD in Polymer, Fiber Science from Clemson University. His research background is in the synthesis of polymer nanocomposites and engineering education. He was trained within the textile industry, which was part of an eleven-year career that spanned textile manufacturing to product development.

Engineer - Educator - Systems Thinker - Innovator - Husband - Father - Brother – Son; Clark is defined by his relationships. He enjoys building understanding and consensus across seemingly disparate groups and ways of thinking. And he enjoys building technological systems and sharing my enjoyment with others by developing and delivering educational experiences. Clark is a learner and an optimist. He grew up on a rural farm and and worked in industry for 11 years; today, he teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology, where he's using the power of story to improve educational experiences and outcomes. A proud member of the KEEN network, Clark is benefiting from wonderful colleagues and trying to give back to the network some fraction of the value he has received.