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I envision a world where embracing change with creative courage is the very essence of what it is to be human.
Pamela L. Jennings, Ph.D., MBA, MFA is a transformation architect leading organizations towards their north star. Pamela has developed federal funding programs, curriculum and research initiatives that center learning, creativity, innovation, engineering, and economic development as levers of change. She served as a committee member on the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering consensus report, Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in Higher Education: branches from the same tree.
Pamela served in several capacities in the federal government. As a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow (2022-2024), she was assigned to the U.S. Department of Transportation Office of the Assistant Secretary of Research, Development, and Technology. There she played a role in implementing several Bipartisan Infrastructure Act initiatives. She served as a Senior Policy Advisor for the NIST CHIPS Office of Research and Development where she supported the National Semiconductor Technology Center and Small Business Innovation Research initiatives. As a National Science Foundation Program Director in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate, Pamela led the CreativeIT program that funded high risk | high reward research bridging computer science, the arts, and the humanities. | ||
Her patented EdTech platform, CONSTRUKTS® is poised to merge hands-on and computational thinking for K-12 STEM learning. (Patent Issued: US-12,343,653 B2; Patent Pending: 19,224,482) Pamela has extensive experience as a professor, administrator, and research director in higher education from R1 universities to Art & Design colleges including Carnegie Mellon University, North Carolina State University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Integrative learning and research, focused on bridging cultures of knowing across STEM, design research, the arts, and entrepreneurship, has been the catalyst for her work. The throughline being her deep interests in changing the narrative of purpose for emerging technologies through creative and critical inquiry. This passion was nurtured by early career opportunities to work alongside mavericks in computer science, at the IBM Almaden Research Center, SRI International, and Carnegie Mellon University. There she worked with engineers and learning scientists who forged paths that led to today’s advances in natural language processing, artificial intelligence, creative computation, and education technology. Those experiences were complemented by her explorations in the digital media arts. She received support and recognition from the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, multiple residencies at the Banff Centre for Creativity and Art, and multiple grants from the New York State Council on the Arts. Pamela’s creative works are discussed in Lisa Farrington’s Creating Their Own Image: the History of African American Women Artists, Oxford University Press and Phyllis Klotman, Janet Cutler’s Struggles for Representation: African American Film/Video/New Media Makers, Indiana University Press.
Pamela’s career has given her broad insights into the processes, hurdles, and impacts of building, managing, and sustaining groundbreaking technology innovation initiatives in complex institutional settings and tech start-ups. She has experienced the possibilities of open-innovation and groundbreaking research in corporate and federal think tanks; the synergies in arts and science pedagogies; how the arts and humanities can generate speculations that inform STEM inquiry and vice versa; the constrictions of the possible when institutional parochialism is too strong; the creative genius that blossoms when given, space and time in places that nurture the imagination; the power of funding to influence the course of innovation and change; the ability to increase academic impacts with small resource shifts; the complexity of building a space for research in emerging technology and creativity that balance government mandates and grassroots enthusiasm.
As a result, Pamela honed keen insights and skills in:
• Navigating academic, federal, non-profit, and corporate institutions to catalyze transformation.
• Leading organizations towards their north star by aligning their actions to their vision and mission.
• Innovating with emerging technologies that augment how we think, see, and do.
• Diversifying the talent that sits at the table where decisions that shape our futures are made.
Integrative learning and research, focused on bridging cultures of knowing across STEM, design research, the arts, and entrepreneurship, has been the catalyst for her work. The throughline being her deep interests in changing the narrative of purpose for emerging technologies through creative and critical inquiry. This passion was nurtured by early career opportunities to work alongside mavericks in computer science, at the IBM Almaden Research Center, SRI International, and Carnegie Mellon University. There she worked with engineers and learning scientists who forged paths that led to today’s advances in natural language processing, artificial intelligence, creative computation, and education technology. Those experiences were complemented by her explorations in the digital media arts. She received support and recognition from the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, multiple residencies at the Banff Centre for Creativity and Art, and multiple grants from the New York State Council on the Arts. Pamela’s creative works are discussed in Lisa Farrington’s Creating Their Own Image: the History of African American Women Artists, Oxford University Press and Phyllis Klotman, Janet Cutler’s Struggles for Representation: African American Film/Video/New Media Makers, Indiana University Press.
Pamela’s career has given her broad insights into the processes, hurdles, and impacts of building, managing, and sustaining groundbreaking technology innovation initiatives in complex institutional settings and tech start-ups. She has experienced the possibilities of open-innovation and groundbreaking research in corporate and federal think tanks; the synergies in arts and science pedagogies; how the arts and humanities can generate speculations that inform STEM inquiry and vice versa; the constrictions of the possible when institutional parochialism is too strong; the creative genius that blossoms when given, space and time in places that nurture the imagination; the power of funding to influence the course of innovation and change; the ability to increase academic impacts with small resource shifts; the complexity of building a space for research in emerging technology and creativity that balance government mandates and grassroots enthusiasm.
As a result, Pamela honed keen insights and skills in:
• Navigating academic, federal, non-profit, and corporate institutions to catalyze transformation.
• Leading organizations towards their north star by aligning their actions to their vision and mission.
• Innovating with emerging technologies that augment how we think, see, and do.
• Diversifying the talent that sits at the table where decisions that shape our futures are made.