A wide beach view looking toward the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset, with soft pink and orange clouds spreading across the sky above the water and distant hills

Carrie McDougall

Carrie McDougall

Biography

Carrie McDougall, PhD, (she/her) is the Acting Director of the Center for Education, Engagement and Evaluation (CEEE) and Senior Associate Scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder. A recognized national leader in science and environmental education, Carrie worked across federal agencies and expanded NOAA’s education impact globally and nationally during her extensive career as a senior program manager in NOAA’s Office of Education. She led the Science On a Sphere program, demonstrating its power as a data visualization education platform and building a global network of users that serve 60 million people a year. Carrie also co-led the Environmental Literacy program, which provided $95M in grants to 163 projects across the U.S. and stimulated a new field, community resilience education. Carrie has collaborated with CIRES/CEEE for several years and is excited to work with the associate directors to lead the education, engagement and evaluation professionals at CEEE. In addition to serving as acting director, she leads a large-scale project to modernize and expand the user and contribution base of the Science On a Sphere Data Catalog, which involves experimenting with AI to automate workflows and create natural-language search capability. Carrie is a marine scientist by training with a doctoral degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Current Research
  • Visualization tools and learning
  • Community Resilience Education, Climate Action
  • Real-time environmental data influences on learning of Earth science
  • Use of interactivity and AI to support learning with data visualizations
  • Collaboration & collective knowledge generation
  • Informal education learning 
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