DrJacqueline Melvold

Jacqueline is an adjunct fellow at Transdisciplinary School who aims to create more desirable and sustainable futures by exploring how the transformation of education can empower young people. She currently works as an Assocaite Professor of Practice, the Compton Chair of Creative Intelligence and Innovation and the Program Director of the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation at the W.A. Franke Honors College at the Univeristy of Arizona.

Her teaching has real-world relevance, and is research-inspired and industry-led - her students learn in collaborative and experiential learning environments, which provide the opportunity to engage in a deep understanding of knowledge so they can apply, evaluate, relate, connect this knowledge to solve the complex societal problems they are presented with. Her innovative approaches to facilitating an effective learning environments have been further recognised via multiple awards, including a UTS Teaching and Learning award for Strengthening the UTS Model of Learning and two UTS Teaching and Learning Team Citations. She has also worked with colleagues to create a UTS first program for high school students which allows them to gain credit for UTS courses before starting at university.

Her award-winning research is impact-driven and intersects around the future of education. She seeks to create a space for mutual learning between educators, academics, and students, to support transdisciplinary learning and professional practice for the empowerment of young people. Aimed at transforming the education sector, she supports educators to develop students who can thrive in a rapidly changing world, respond to the complex societal problems, and thus create a more sustainable, just and equitable future by reimagining preferable futures in education. In 2022, she was recognised for this research and was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Research Excellence Awards as part of a team, it recognises our collaborative efforts in strengthening the nexus of transdisciplinary education and research around the BCII, extending into K-12 schools and industry.

She gained her PhD from UTS in 2017 where her thesis centred around characterising emerging pathogens via proteogenomic approaches. As a passionate educator, she strive to be at the forefront of innovative education, which is seen in her continuous professional development in teaching and learning via my completion of a Graduate Certificate in Transdisciplinary Learning in Higher Education (UTS), the Designing your Life program from Stanford University and the Kaospilot Designing and Facilitating Learning Spaces program from Kaospilot.