Heather is a Scholar-Practitioner, studying hands-on education in the classroom and scaling best practices in the field. Heather completed her PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2015. While a graduate student, Heather developed a vision for seeing MIT-style hands-on learning environments manifest around the globe. She became active in the MIT D-Lab, where she co-founded the D-Lab: Education (https://d-lab.mit.edu/courses/education) class, mentoring dozens of students in projects spanning four continents.

In 2016, Heather moved to Ghana, where she founded and leads Practical Education Network (PEN) (https://www.practicaleducationnetwork.com) in the training of thousands of African STEM teachers to deploy experiential pedagogies. In that process, she has developed partnerships with several stakeholders in the education ecosystem, infused low-cost, hands-on STEM content into the national curricula, built a strong local team, and tested models for scaling the impact. Heather has served on the engineering faculty since 2018, helping build Ashesi’s Mechanical Engineering program.

She leads the Ashesi Resourceful Engineering Lab (AREL), which explores the mechanisms and manifestations of indigenous innovation, particularly in fluid mechanics, renewable energy, and experiential education.