Christmas came early in 2020, as I had the chance to interview an awesome group of leaders from across the informal learning and science communication fields to learn about their experiences with research-practice partnerships (RPPs). My job was to learn about their work and to identify themes that might inform the field. Life began to imitate art as the entire group continued to work together in early 2022 on a publication that came out recently, and that focuses on the roles of thinking partners and boundary spanners in RPPs about public engagement with science. Read all about it here!

Meet Karen
Hello, and thanks for visiting my site. I am an evaluator and researcher who studies both formal and informal STEM education programs. My favorites are those that are particularly tricky to study, like science festivals and citizen science projects. I received fantastic Ph.D. training in the psych department at Duke, and have applied my skills to the field of education since 2002.
I started doing independent consulting work in 2007 and founded KPC in 2010, with a focus on STEM education. I split my time between providing external evaluation services for some and collaborating to publish educational research with others. A lot of my most recent work has focused on evaluation capacity building, and a number of the resources on this site are from those projects.