• Faculty Committee
• Services & Program Offerings
• Staff

Staff

Director

Carolyn Wood Assistant Academic Dean and Director of SLATE and Case Program 617-496-6230 carolyn_wood@harvard.edu

Carolyn Wood directs the school’s program on Strengthening Learning and Teaching Excellence (SLATE) and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Case Program. She also conducts institutional research, coordinates the Kennedy School’s academic areas, and supports the Faculty Steering Committee which provides curriculum oversight as well as broader strategic advice to the Dean.

In addition to her administrative roles, Carolyn works with Professor Linda Bilmes to teach an experiential learning course on Advanced Applied Budgeting where student teams spend a full semester conducting real-world financial projects for a local municipal government. Together with Doug Ahlers, Carolyn helped establish the Broadmoor Project, a partnership between the Harvard Kennedy School and the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans to help support and capture lessons from community-based recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. To date the Broadmoor Project has sent more than 90 Harvard students to work in Broadmoor through spring break projects, summer internships, and a new course on Disaster Recovery Management and Urban Development which includes a January field module in Broadmoor.

Previously, Carolyn served five years as the Associate Director of Finance at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she helped to reverse a $6M operating deficit and establish a $2M unrestricted cash reserve fund. Prior to that, she served as Vice President for Research at the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), a non-profit founded by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter. She holds a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she focused on economic development planning.

Pedagogy Staff

Allison Pingree Director of Professional Pedagogy 617-496-6255 allison_pingree@hks.harvard.edu

Allison Pingree joined SLATE as Director of Professional Pedagogy in 2011.   In this role, she offers individualized instructional consultation and coaching to HKS faculty (including class observations, syllabus design, strategies for managing classroom dynamics, and mid-course student feedback), facilitates the HKS Teaching Seminar series and Case Teaching Workshop, organizes the New Faculty Institute and HKS Teaching Week, and disseminates and supports research-based best practices for professional pedagogy in the HKS teaching community.

She brings to this work a broad range of experience, having served for 13 years as Director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, which offers consultations, workshops, conferences and other resources to faculty and graduate teaching assistants in all of the university’s schools (including business, law, engineering, education, medicine and nursing).  At Vanderbilt, she also served as Assistant Professor of Medical Education and Administration, Lecturer in Education, and Affiliated Faculty in American Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies.

Allison holds a PhD in English & American Literature from Harvard, taught here in English, History & Literature and Expository Writing, and served as an Acting Associate Director at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.  Her research interests include interdisciplinary teaching, learning and collaboration, leadership and organizational change, and gender and pedagogy. Her passion as an educator lies in cultivating ways to integrate cognitive, affective, and embodied forms of learning to promote individual and social change.

Josh Bookin Pedagogy and Curriculum Specialist 617-493-3707 josh_bookin@hks.harvard.edu

Josh Bookin's main role is to help professors identify well-designed curricular materials that can enhance existing HKS courses.  In addition, he researches relevant instructional best practices, assists with the writing of case teaching notes, trains teaching assistants, and examines ways technology can be used in the classroom to enhance student learning.

Case Writing/Video Production Staff

Pam Varley Case Writer 617-495-0590 pam_varley@harvard.edu

Pam Varley is the Harvard Kennedy School’s in-house case writer and case writing consultant.  She researches and writes original HKS teaching cases and consults with faculty and freelance case writers about the case writing process. 

Pam is an award-winning case writer, who has written a broad array of teaching materials in the course of her 25 years at HKS.  She began her career in journalism, and continues to write and edit on a freelance basis.  She has edited a book on international labor standards, The Sweatshop Quandary: Corporate Responsibility on the Global Frontier. 

Laura Winig Case Writer 617-495-8329 laura_winig@hks.harvard.edu

Laura Winig is a case writer for the SLATE program at the Kennedy School. Prior to joining the Kennedy School, Laura served as Senior Researcher at Harvard Business School where she co-authored more than 60 cases, teaching notes, and other curricular materials for the MBA and Executive Education programs. Before joining academia, Laura held marketing leadership roles at MIT Sloan Management Review and Harvard Business Publishing. She is also Executive Director of Venturing Out, a Massachusetts non-profit that teaches entrepreneurship within prisons.

Anjani Datla Case Writer 617-496-8735 anjani_datla@hks.harvard.edu

Anjani Datla is case writer for the SLATE program. Anjani’s research and writing has focused on international development. Prior to joining SLATE, she worked as a writer and program consultant at the United Nations Development Programme. She also served as the Assistant Director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College between 2008 and 2010. Anjani has written on a wide range of topics including the impact of AIDS on developing countries and women’s rights to property in South Asia. She has a master in public policy from Carnegie Mellon University.

Patricia Garcia-Rios Multimedia Case Writer 617-496-1976 patricia_garcia-rios@harvard.edu

Patricia Garcia-Rios is responsible for developing a wide range of video and multimedia curriculum materials aimed at enhancing teaching and learning at HKS. She is a filmmaker with fifteen years’ experience in award-winning PBS documentaries. Prior to joining SLATE, Patricia acted as producer and co-producer on a number of public television series, including Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? (2008), Reconstruction: The Second Civil War (2004) and Chicago: City of the Century (2003). Her work on another PBS series, Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery (1998), earned her an Emmy award for research. Before receiving a Fulbright fellowship to pursue graduate studies in Boston, Patricia was a print journalist in her native Spain.  She began her career in documentaries in the early 1990s at the legendary production company Blackside, Inc. of Eyes on the Prize fame. Patricia combines a passion for visual storytelling with a keen interest in public policy issues and international affairs.

Operations Staff

Rebecca Loose Associate Director of SLATE 617-496-5448 rebecca_loose@harvard.edu

Rebecca Loose joined the SLATE team in June 2008 and is responsible for managing administrative, financial and marketing activities for SLATE and helps determine curricular support needs, prepares business plans, and works with internal and external resources on the development, roll out, and assessment of SLATE products and services.

Rebecca spent three years as part of the Kennedy School’s IT senior management team as a project manager/consultant on a number of administrative systems projects. She has successfully led a number of cross-functional teams and has experience in business and strategic planning.

Prior to coming to the Kennedy School, Rebecca worked as a consultant and project manager for PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, Time Warner Book Group, and Blue Cross Blue Shield. Rebecca has a BBA in Operations Management and Information Technology (with a secondary concentration in Economics) from the College of William and Mary.

Christy Murphy Case Publications Coordinator 617-495-1166 christina_murphy@hks.harvard.edu

Christy Murphy works part-time as the Case Publications Coordinator for SLATE and the Appointments Committee Coordinator for the Academic Dean’s Office. As the Case Publications Coordinator, Christy is responsible for proofreading and editing case studies and other forms of curricular materials for publication. She handles researching and requesting permission for reproduction and use of copyrighted material in case studies to be published and also confers with authors, faculty sponsors and document sources on content and revisions.