Pinkard is the Alice Hamilton Professor of Education and Social Policy and Faculty Director of the Office Community Education Partnerships at Northwestern University. She is the founder of Digital Youth Network and CitiesLearn, a social learning platform that connects youth’s learning opportunities across the school, home, community, and beyond. Through collaborations with city agencies (e.g. YOUmedia with the Chicago Public Library, City of Learning with Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, and My Chi, My Future with Mayor Lightfoot). Dr. Pinkard and DYN’s work has ignited new models for reimagining, visualizing, and documenting learning across spaces through the creation of existence proofs in urban contexts. Dr. Pinkard is the recipient of a 2010 Common Sense Media Award for Outstanding Commitment to Creativity and Youth, the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies, an NSF Early CAREER Fellowship. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, an M.S. in Computer Science from Northwestern University, and a Ph.D. in Learning Sciences from Northwestern University. Her current scholarly interests include the design and use of socio-technical systems to support communities in designing healthy and joyful learning opportunities that all families in integrating STEAM into their learning and leisure lifestyles.