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Kathleen Head currently serves as the Director of the Global Experience Office (GEO) at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The GEO oversees and administers WPI’s signature Global Projects Program in addition to exchange programs and other sponsored off-campus travel. Before joining WPI, Kathleen Head worked at Elmhurst University as the Director of International Education. In this position, she oversaw all domestic and global off-campus programs and served as the Principal Designated School Official (PDSO).

In addition to her staff role at Elmhurst, Kathleen also taught various undergraduate classes, such as Introduction to International Studies, as an adjunct faculty member. Prior to Elmhurst, Kathleen was the Director of the Center for International Studies at MCPHS University (formerly Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences), overseeing all education abroad activities, exchange programming, and other international projects. Her responsibilities included leading institutional, international strategic initiatives; spearheading the development, implementation and monitoring of international programs and affiliations; evaluation and assessment of academic quality and safety, including risk assessment and management, of education abroad activities; and administration of education abroad scholarship funds.

Kathleen has contributed to various publications and presented at relevant professional conferences. In her spare time, Kathleen is committed to contributing to the field of education abroad and international education. While in Boston, she chaired the Community Engagement Taskforce in collaboration with the Boston Area Study Abroad Association and Boston Public Schools. Most recently, Kathleen was selected as a member of the Forum on Education Abroad’s Standards of Good Practice Consensus Body and also participated as a Grant Reviewer for the Capacity Building Program for U.S. Study Abroad in 2019. Kathleen earned a BA in Spanish from Colgate University where she spent a semester studying at the Universidad de Sevilla in Spain. In addition, Kathleen completed her Master of Science in Global Studies and International Affairs at Northeastern University where she conducted field research in Italy as a part of her thesis on the Bologna Process, European higher education, and student mobility. 

Sarah Stanlick,  Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrative and Global Studies and the Director of the Great Problems Seminar at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She was the founding director of Lehigh University’s Center for Community Engagement and faculty member in Sociology and Anthropology. She previously taught at Centenary College of New Jersey and was a researcher at Harvard’s Kennedy School, assisting the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power. She has published in journals such as The Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, The Social Studies, and the Journal of Global Citizenship and Equity Education. She co-chairs the Imagining America Assessing Practices of Public Scholarship (APPS) collective, which focuses on democratically-engaged assessment practices to empower and transform systems, communities, and individuals.

She is a member of SSSP and serves on the Steering Committee for the Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative (The Collaborative). Her priority for teaching, research, and service is to encourage and model engaged, active citizenship and help create conditions for all community members to be able engage similarly. Her current interests include global citizenship, health and human rights, transformative learning, and the internet’s impact on empowerment and capacity to build community.

Professor Stanlick directs WPI’s signature first-year experience program, the Great Problems Seminar. She is also responsible for the delivery and support of global project-based learning through the Global Projects Program. She also teaches social science research methods for students of all backgrounds and majors in preparation for the interactive qualifying project (IQP), a 7-week project with external sponsors. Her commitment to transformative and inclusive learning that engages students as active agents includes her regular participation in faculty learning communities at WPI and collaborative work to advance the integration of open educational resources and open pedagogical practices across the WPI curriculum.