Introducing Our New Fellows

The Cooney Center is thrilled to introduce our new fellows, who have joined us in our New York City office this month. Please join us in giving them a warm welcome!

 

Hello all! I am Anna Ly, one of the fellows here at the Cooney Center, and it is my pleasure to introduce my colleague, Christina Hinton!

Christina has spent a lot of time at Harvard. She completed her doctorate and master’s in mind, brain and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and she must really love it there because now she is a faculty member at Harvard, teaching graduate students about research and development in education. However, she has managed to escape the long, cold Boston winters quite often, traveling across the Americas, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Middle East. Her leadership in educational neuroscience has given her the opportunity to lecture in all of those regions! Christina’s expansive international experience started when she worked in multilateral diplomacy and international policy-making at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) in Paris. There she co-penned two books, Understanding the Brain: The Birth of a Learning Science and Languages in a Global World: Learning for Better Cultural Understanding. After learning to navigate the complex political, economic, and cultural aspects of education policy-making, Christina was inspired to make a direct impact on the lives of children through educational media. She joined the Cooney Center this fall, and the rest is history. When Christina is not at Sesame or Harvard, you might catch her dancing, zumba-ing (is that a verb yet?), or even trapezing!

Thanks so much, Anna! Hi, I am Christina Hinton, and I would like to introduce Anna Ly, my fellow fellow at the Cooney Center.

Anna is a brilliant designer with a sharp business sense who comes to us from sunny California. Anna has impressive experience in the corporate world. She completed an undergraduate degree in HCI and Business (Finance) from Carnegie Mellon. After many years in finance, she linked business with technology at IBM, where she worked for three years as a Business Strategy and Transformation Consultant focusing on Organizational Change Strategy and Business Strategy. She then escaped the corporate world all together, and completed Stanford’s Learning, Design and Technology Master’s degree. At Stanford, her work focused on User Experience Research and Design, educational Tangible User Interfaces, and socio-emotional learning for children with autism. Anna also launched several innovative applications! She created Emotionary (now downloadable on iTunes!), an emotion diary tool for iPad designed for therapists to help children and adolescents with autism understand emotions in the context of their own lives. She also co-created Me.Mu for Kinect, a pair of mini-games to help children with autism practice social skills while developing general motor coordination. This project was selected as one of the top 100 applications submitted to the 2012 Microsoft Kinect Challenge! For both projects, Anna was the lead visual designer, as well as the UX designer. On the side, Anna worked for Intel as a User Experience Specialist in the PC Client Group where she focused on design in education. This fall, Anna joined the Cooney Center, where she is excited to further bridge her industry and technology experience to education research and children’s media. I am thrilled to be working with such a talented colleague! When Anna is not at Sesame, you might find her out stalking Martha Stewart. Just kidding! She is a huge Martha Stewart fan, though, and has coordinated numerous weddings (none with any bridezillas thankfully) and developed event paper goods that draw inspiration from Martha’s work. Feel free to check her work out at www.stanford.edu/~akly.