About Us

Kathleen deLaski

Founder & President

Kathleen founded the Education Design Lab after eight years on the Board of Virginia’s largest public university, George Mason. A social entrepreneur, she has launched or co-launched four non-profits in the past two decades, all related to improving the quality of education for non-elite students. With the Lab, she saw the need for a non-profit to help learning institutions and other players design education toward the future of a fast changing world. As the Lab has supported some 60 universities, as well as employers and high schools, in their innovation design work, Kathleen has been asked to share learnings and ideas about the broken pipeline, 21st century skills and the learner-driven revolution around the world.

In addition, Kathleen serves as the president of the deLaski Family Foundation, a leading grantmaker in education reform and new pathways to the middle class. She founded and serves as board chair for EdFuel, a national non-profit working to build a diverse talent leadership pipeline for K-12 education. Previously, Kathleen created Sallie Mae’s award-winning college access foundation, co-founded Building Hope, a charter school facilities financing non-profit and helped Michelle Rhee create StudentsFirst, a national advocacy movement to improve school options and quality.

Spending five years at America Online, she developed the first interactive tools to engage the public online in elections and the political process and helped the biggest news organizations create digital brands. She and her boss, Steve Case, were named by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics among “25 People Changing the World.” Kathleen was named by President Clinton as Chief Spokesman for the Pentagon, where she oversaw the military’s worldwide public information team. She also spent 13 years as a TV journalist, including 5 years as an ABC News Washington correspondent.

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Dawan Stanford, JD, PhD

Design Fellow

Dawan is a Design Fellow at the Lab, where he provides advice and insight to the Lab team on design-driven innovation. He was previously the Lab’s Founding Design Director, developing and evolving key design and innovation tools.

Dawan is currently President and Founder of Fluid Hive, and also serves as the Director of Design Thinking at Elon University, where he is developing and leading the university’s “Elon By Design” initiative. At Elon, Dawan works with students, faculty, and staff to help facilitate, advise and advance design thinking programming and application at the university, as well as to connect Elon with others around the country doing similar work.

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Michelle Batt

Design Challenge Lead

Michelle is a Design Challenge Lead for the Lab’s Badging Challenge. Michelle is also the President of Lead by Experience, offering strategic and tactical consulting to help leadership teams across: business, health care and education improve their customer experience.

Through her coaching, Michelle loves to “gently” break up typical functional silos to stimulate collaboration and steer change management across organizations. She integrates new, cost effective, ways to capture and understand customers’ expectations, wants and needs.

Prior to establishing her own business, Michelle held executive positions in telecommunications at MCI and NII Holdings where she held the position of Senior Director of Customer Experience. Michelle earned a Masters of Arts degree in Education: Curriculum & Instruction from Loyola College in Maryland and completed an Executive Certification in Global Leadership from Georgetown University – the McDonough School of Business.

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Tyler Cowen, PhD

Adviser

Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University and also Director of the Mercatus Center. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1987. His book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better was a New York Times best-seller.

He was recently named in an Economist poll as one of the most influential economists of the last decade and Bloomberg BusinessWeek dubbed him “America’s Hottest Economist.” Foreign Policy magazine named him as one of its “Top 100 Global Thinkers” of 2011.

His book, An Economist Gets Lunch considers the economics of global food, and his very latest, Average is Over, looks at the implications of increasing inequality. He also co-writes a blog with Alex Tabarrokat www.marginalrevolution.com and together they have initiated an on-line economics education project, MRUniversity.com.

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Gabriella Schiro

Challenge Coordinator

As the Education Design Lab’s Challenge Coordinator, Gabriella provides support for the 21st Century Skills Badging Challenge and the Connected Pathways initiative—focusing particularly on project coordination, communications, and session planning and execution.

Gabriella has a multi-faceted background in both design and administration. She began her career in 2011 as the Exhibitions Marketing Assistant at International Arts & Artists, a nonprofit organization dedicated to sharing and promoting the arts both nationally and internationally. After serving in as a manager at several art- and design-oriented organizations and businesses, she joined the Education Design Lab as the Graphic Designer & Office Manager. In that position, she worked across many Lab internal and external projects—designing print and digital materials and supporting all aspects of the Lab’s operations.

A graduate of Gettysburg College with a bachelor’s in Studio Art and Religious Studies, Gabriella not only brings a strong understanding of design principles to the Lab’s projects, but also a passion for interdisciplinary thinking, personal narrative, and social design.

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Michael Meotti

Higher Ed Fellow

Mike brings extensive experience in higher education policy, innovation and management to Education Design Lab’s work. Mike has a broad perspective on the challenges facing colleges and universities based on his past leadership positions in state government, nonprofit organizations and higher education systems. He has led transformation initiatives in all of these sectors.

Mike served as Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Higher Education and Executive Vice President and chief operating officer of the Connecticut Board of Regents for Higher Education.

Mike was a member of the Executive Committee and Vice Chair of the Federal Relations Committee of the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO). He led the Connecticut delegation in the National Governors Association Best Practices Academy “Complete to Compete” and in Complete College America. Michael was also active in the state policy track of Achieving the Dream and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Coalition for the Common Core Standards. He earned his J.D. and B.S. degrees from Georgetown University.

Prior to his work in higher education, Mike led several nonprofit organizations that provided services addressing the needs of many “first generation” and returning adult students.

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Dawan Stanford, JD, PhD

Director, Design Strategy & Operations

As Education Design Lab’s Director of Design Strategy and Operations, Dawan develops and evolves the Lab’s design thinking and innovation tools, oversees its design challenges, and has strategic and overall operations responsibilities.

Driven by ideas from design and media theory, Dawan earned his Ph.D. from the European Graduate School. His research, teaching and published work explore how we learn, create and communicate. A Berkeley Law graduate, Dawan spent the early internet boom in Silicon Valley working with start-ups and multinationals and played several legal roles internationally for Symantec Corporation and others.

Prior to joining the Lab, Dawan ran a design thinking consultancy and a management consultancy combining design strategy and gerontology. Dawan also lead Design Thinking: DC, a growing community of more than 2,000 designers, innovators and entrepreneurs coming together in Washington D.C. to make practical use of design thinking for business, government and nonprofits.

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Alexander Williams

ReDesign Associate

As Education Design Lab’s ReDesign Associate, Alexander reinvents higher education through project coordination and institutional collaboration, with a particular focus on engaging the Innovator Network and fueling the Lab’s impact engine. He envisions higher education as a mechanism for empowerment, developed from working with institutional consortia in Virginia, New Jersey, Kentucky, and now DC.

Alexander first became exposed to the intricacies of higher education while serving as a Student Representative on the Board of Visitors for George Mason University. Recognizing that the individuals involved in the education process produce the value associated with that education, Alexander took the leap to become one of those involved individuals and began a career in education. As a graduate student at Teachers College of Columbia University studying for a Master of Arts in Higher Education Administration, he published research with fellow students and faculty on education leadership models and coordinated special projects for the New Jersey Consortium of Community Colleges. After graduating, Alexander moved to Louisville, Kentucky to complete a year of service as an AmeriCorps VISTA. Serving under the leadership of 55,000 Degrees, he analyzed student success data for Jefferson Community & Technical College and organized community collaboration efforts around educational persistence for the Louisville metro area.

A proud native of DC, Alexander brings to the Lab his passion for a higher education experience that empowers individuals personally and socially. He is excited to be involved in the questions related to skills badging, traditional model redesign, and the overall work of the Lab.

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Laurence Roth

Chief Growth Officer

Larry is Chief Growth Officer at the Education Design Lab, developing and executing partnership strategies to maximize the Lab’s mission to support underserved student populations in the “Learner Revolution.” At the Lab, he also advises both intrepreneurs and entrepreneurs designing new programs and services for the post-secondary market. Larry brings 25 years of experience leading and advising start-up/early stage companies in the digital media and education technology sectors. He was most recently at the national non-profit College Summit, where he launched and operated a national initiative designed to dramatically re-envision the organization’s program and business models.

Previously, Larry was a senior executive with Agile Mind, an early stage provider of digital mathematics programs for grades 8-12 in partnership with the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to his work in education, he co-founded Cinea, Inc., a digital rights management company, which was recognized as one of the top Virginia start-ups in 2004. After selling the company to Dolby Laboratories (NYSE: DLB) he continued there as a vice president of marketing and business development. Previously, Larry worked as an executive with AOL, Viacom and MGM/UA and was one of the pioneers in the media industry’s transition to digital publishing and distribution.

Larry has been recognized for his work with young entrepreneurs in the Fairfax County Public Schools, and was a finalist for the FAST 50 award, honoring the leading entrepreneurs in the State of Virginia. He also sits on the Board of Innovate and Educate, a national organization dedicated to developing alternative employment pathways for underserved populations in the U.S and around the world. Larry holds an M.B.A. from the Andersen School at UCLA and a bachelor’s degree in Science, Technology and Society from Vassar College.

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Binh Thuy Do

Director of Projects

Binh brings a unique set of design experiences, strategic planning and project management skills to the Education Design Lab. Her work engagements have spanned both K-12 and higher education; in the latter, she has done extensive work leading strategic master planning efforts with a number of higher education institutions throughout California.

Binh uses a practical approach to everyday innovation and employs the Lab’s design process, methods and tools with an eye toward expanding the range of the possible while remaining grounded in the real world constraints. Solid innovation requires both generating new ways of responding to unmet human needs and operating model innovation based on understanding how higher education institutions work. Binh excels at weaving this balance into the Lab’s work.

Binh is deeply passionate about reimagining education to meet the needs of all stakeholders. Her interest in learning innovation extends to her own educational career: she received her MBA from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University; a leading program that emphasized extensive online team collaboration on case study work, mirroring the experience of those on campus.

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Ricardo Goncalves

Designer In Residence

Ricardo is a design strategist, knowledge broker and social entrepreneur working in the intersection of design, education and technology. He holds a MFA in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons The New School for Design (New York). His graduation thesis project, entitled Flip it Forward, explored the future of learning in K-12 education through design in contexts as diverse as India, The U.S. and China. Flip it Forward has been awarded by The New School and selected by the Unreasonable Institute as an innovative approach to re-imagining education.

Ricardo’s work is an attempt to collaboratively respond to pressing social changes—moving from problem-solving into dreaming, imagining and co-creative spaces. He believes that in order to scale positive social change, organizations are required to shift their routines, cultures and ways of working.

Core topics of expertise: knowledge dissemination (capacity building, networks); design-thinking; design of learning environments; open innovation; systems thinking; social-emotional learning, and social innovation. For further information about his work: www.ricardo-dutra.com.

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Maythana Paquete

May Paquete

Administrative Assistant & Design Associate

As Education Design Lab’s Service Design Associate, Sarah provides support across several Lab projects. Trained as an industrial and interaction designer, she is assisting the development and execution of the Lab’s crowdsourcing initiative to future higher education ecosystems. She is also lending her design thinking, graphic design, and storytelling expertise to projects such as the 21st Century Skills Badging Challenge.

Sarah worked at Hallmark Cards Inc. in Kansas City, Missouri as an Industrial Design Intern. During that time, she used design thinking methods to develop new products areas for their Christmas Line and assisted in the re-design of a customization ordering software. While at Syracuse University, she led the school’s chapter of Industrial Designer Society of America for two years and held design challenges and design thinking workshops for students.

Sarah is a graduate of the Industrial and Interaction Design Program at Syracuse University. She is looking forward to using her skills in design thinking, user-centered design, and experience design to do work in the social realm.

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Brian LeDuc

Education Designer

As an Education Designer, Brian manages and executes new education model design challenges with education institutions and foundations, supporting the Lab’s knowledge management for innovations in higher education, and contributes to the design and ongoing development of the Lab’s design process, methods and experiences.

With students at the center, Brian utilizes his background in psychology, student development, and
experience across a variety of educational contexts to explore innovative education models alongside a wide range of stakeholders.

Prior to joining the lab, Brian led operations for a coding bootcamp, establishing the campus operations in its’ permanent location, expanding program offerings, and growing its’ enrollment pipeline while deepening its’ roots in the DC community. Previously, Brian supported institutions emergence into national leaders in the area of student success at EAB, guiding project management for advising technologies, implementation of student success best practices, and analysis of historic graduation trends to identify areas of opportunity in support of institutional goals. Working on campus at several universities in first year programs, orientation, residence life, and leadership education, Brian draws from a breadth of institutional contexts and perspectives on campus and beyond with volunteer experiences across NASPA, ACPA, and NACA.

To maintain his engagement with students, Brian serves as a Lead Facilitator for the Kiwanis International Key Leader program designed to enhance leadership skills and personal awareness through weekend retreats for high school students. Brian earned his Psychology degree from Roger Williams University, where he continues to serve on the Alumni Board, and his Masters from Texas A&M University in Educational Administration while serving as a member of the Board of Directors to the National Association for Campus Activities.

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May Paquete

Design Associate and Administrative Assistant

As Education Design Lab’s Design Associate and Administrative Assistant, May designs visual explanations, information graphics, and print and digital materials while maintaining a productive office environment. She supports all aspects of the Lab’s operations, from design challenges to design facilitation.

May graduated from the University of Maryland School of Public Health in 2012 with a degree in Behavioral & Community Health. After working in public health policy for three years, May became a 2015-2016 Health for America Fellow at MedStar Health, where she was challenged to use design strategy to create an innovative solution for improving outcomes for people living with type 2 diabetes. The fellowship ignited her passion for training in human-centered design. May graduated from University of Maryland in Behavioral and Community Health, where she also worked on Sister to Sister: Life Choices, an intervention targeted to reduce obesity rates in African-American women.

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Kathleen deLaski

Founder & President

Kathleen founded the Education Design Lab after eight years on the Board of Virginia’s largest public university, George Mason. A social entrepreneur, she has launched or co-launched four non-profits in the past two decades, all related to improving the quality of education for non-elite students. With the Lab, she saw the need for a non-profit to help learning institutions and other players design education toward the future of a fast changing world. As the Lab has supported some 60 universities, as well as employers and high schools, in their innovation design work, Kathleen has been asked to share learnings and ideas about the broken pipeline, 21st century skills and the learner-driven revolution around the world.

In addition, Kathleen serves as the president of the deLaski Family Foundation, a leading grantmaker in education reform and new pathways to the middle class. She founded and serves as board chair for EdFuel, a national non-profit working to build a diverse talent leadership pipeline for K-12 education. Previously, Kathleen created Sallie Mae’s award-winning college access foundation, co-founded Building Hope, a charter school facilities financing non-profit and helped Michelle Rhee create StudentsFirst, a national advocacy movement to improve school options and quality.

Spending five years at America Online, she developed the first interactive tools to engage the public online in elections and the political process and helped the biggest news organizations create digital brands. She and her boss, Steve Case, were named by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics among “25 People Changing the World.” Kathleen was named by President Clinton as Chief Spokesman for the Pentagon, where she oversaw the military’s worldwide public information team. She also spent 13 years as a TV journalist, including 5 years as an ABC News Washington correspondent.

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Tara Lifland

Design Associate

As an Associate Education Designer, Tara provides support for the 21st Century Skills Badging Challenge and is helping learning institutions implement badges to capture and assess smaller increments of learning than courses and degrees. Tara brings to the lab an institutional perspective, after working as an Instructional Designer for the George Washington University’s eDesign Shop. In addition to developing stunning online courses, Tara worked with a team of librarians to found GW’s Open Textbook Initiative. She first became interested in the #GoOpen movement in her time working with the Saylor Foundation and the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education.

Her work with open education continues as an OER Research Fellow with the Open Education Group. Her research looks at the impact of connected learning, and measures undergraduate students perceptions and attitudes toward sharing and learning in the open.

Tara also serves as a vice-chair of UPCEA’s eDesign collaborative, a group of instructional designers and multimedia professionals who get together to share innovative practices in online learning.

Tara’s higher education experience began as an undergrad in Tel-Aviv, where she was thrust into the booming startup life. Her capstone research was about the future of work and how millennials learn which led her to pursue a master’s in Educational Leadership & Technology at GWU.

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Tyler Wu

Design Associate

Tyler wears multiple hats at the Lab. He helps develop partnerships with learning institutions, employers and foundations. He supports the Chief Growth Officer in maximizing the Lab’s impact in supporting underserved student populations. Tyler also manages the Lab’s social media conversations and our 1200 member Innovation Network, looking for ways in which the Lab can influence conversations about the “Learner Revolution.”

As the first person in his family to go to college, Tyler is determined to redesign the postsecondary system to meet the needs of the new traditional student through a student-centered approach. Tyler received his Master’s in Higher Education Policy and Finance from George Washington University and Bachelor’s in Psychology from the University of Washington.

Tyler began his involvement in higher education through serving as the Student Body President for the University of Washington. This experience launched his interest in establishing an accessible and quality higher education system for underrepresented communities. He then moved to Washington, D.C. to expand his knowledge of federal policy in the context of education. He has worked as a higher education intern for the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and the federal policy and advocacy intern for the Institute for Higher Education Policy. He also spent time at the College Board as a public policy graduate intern working on higher education strategy and partnership efforts.

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About Us

Meet Our Team

Kathleen Delaski

Larry Roth

Binh Thuy Do

Don Fraser

Brian LeDuc

Tyler Wu

Tara Lifland

May Paquete

Alex Williams

Ricardo Gonclaves

Dawan Stanford

The Lab relies on the expertise of a broad group of Board Members and Advisors to guide and grow our work.

What We Do

We offer a range of services and are always looking for new partners to explore the future of education and work. Learn more about our services:

Sample Design Partners

Kathleen deLaski

Founder & President

Dawan Stanford, JD, PhD

Design Fellow

Design Challenge Lead

Adviser

Gabriella Schiro

Challenge Coordinator

Michael Meotti

Higher Ed Fellow

Dawan Stanford, JD, PhD

Director, Design Strategy & Operations

Alexander Williams

ReDesign Associate

Laurence Roth

Chief Growth Officer

Binh Thuy Do

Director of Projects

Ricardo Goncalves

Designer In Residence

May Paquete

Administrative Assistant & Design Associate

Brian LeDuc

Education Designer

May Paquete

Design Associate and Administrative Assistant

Kathleen deLaski

Founder & President

Tara Lifland

Design Associate

Tyler Wu

Design Associate