Tessa McKenzie

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.

Valerie Holton

Valerie Holton, PhD, LCSW, was one of the instructors for Collaborative Curiosity. She is recognized for her work on the role of urban universities in their communities and the infrastructure needed to enhance their impact within their institutions and across their communities. In her current role as the director of community-engaged research in the Division of Community Engagement at Virginia Commonwealth University, she leads the division’s involvement in building universitywide infrastructure to advance community-engaged research (CEnR). Additionally, she supports the development of the division’s and university’s capacity to track and measure the impact of VCU’s engagement. She also serves as the executive editor of Metropolitan Universities journal (MUJ).

David Coogan

David Coogan, associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, founded and codirects Open Minds: Shared Inquiries, Shared Hope (OPENMINDS), which enables college students and prisoners at the Richmond City Jail to take courses in the humanities. He is coeditor, with John Ackerman, of The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement . His essays on teaching writing in under-served communities have appeared in journals—College Composition and Communication, College English, and Community Literacy —and books—Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric for Social Movements, Texts of Consequence: Composing Social Activism for the Classroom and Community , and Working for Justice: A Handbook of Prison Education and Activism. Visit www.davidcoogan.com to read an excerpt of his next book, Writing Our Way Out: Memoirs from Jail.