Karen joined the College of Engineering in her current role in November of 2010. She provides grant strategy and writing support for College of Engineering faculty, with a particular focus on supporting new and untenured faculty. She brings shape to funding ideas, and examines strategy, document structure, and visual and editorial design to ensure that faculty communicate ideas effectively in clear, readable proposals. Karen also provided support in the 2010–11 academic year as the Senior Investigator for the NSF-grant funded STEM Station.

Given the emerging research and student interest in sustainability, Karen also has a unique interest in helping faculty who want to promote systems thinking, product and process design to minimize resource use, environmental stewardship, and greater sharing of ideas between business people and technologists.

Karen brings twenty years of corporate experience to this role, where as a writer and creative strategist consulting with a variety of Fortune 500 companies, she helped the teams she worked with produce proposals, design documents, and presentations that clearly described their ideas. She also ensured that those ideas were responsive to client needs, priorities, and desired performance outcomes.

Karen has a master’s degree in Instructional Systems from Indiana University (it’s much like the college’s Instructional & Performance Technology program), and a BA from Brown University in both art and English. She serves on the board of the non-profit Sustainable Futures, performs in community theater from time-to-time, and maintains an art portfolio at http://www.coroflot.com/kmarker