Karen has more than 20 years of experience in public health and education. She has participated in and led a number of research and evaluation assignments in education and health, and has broad experience as a program advisor, trainer, researcher, curriculum and educational materials developer, and capacity builder in the U.S. and abroad. Karen has formal training in the Master of Public Health program at the University of Michigan.

Karen started her career with WEI in Nepal in 1997 as the Research Coordinator for a three-year, USAID-funded study measuring the impact of girls’ and women’s education on development indicators. She then worked for WEI in the US until 2004 as a Research Dissemination Coordinator, providing overall coordination of dissemination activities for ten research teams (at five universities throughout the United States) to develop their capacity to effectively disseminate research findings to various audiences. Karen lived and worked overseas in Cambodia, Uganda, and Zambia from 2004 to 2015, and in 2015 she rejoined WEI in the home office as a Senior Technical Advisor for the Bantwana Initiative. She currently provides technical support to Bantwana’s Mozambique programming.