Kathy Nelson is a creative and organized educator with more than fifteen years of large scale, whole school turnaround experience in urban public education. She is currently the Deputy Director for Diplomas Now – a national dropout prevention program - at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to that she was the Director of Implementation for the Talent Development Middle Grades programs at Johns Hopkins University, where she directed all outreach and implementation efforts for the program. She was Program Director at UCLA’s School Management Program, which provided executive management training to K-12 practitioners & administrators in the Los Angeles Unified School District implementing whole-school change. Nelson has been a consultant to districts developing K-12 content and performance standards. As well as strong management experience, she has done considerable work in curriculum design – specifically Social Studies programs for secondary students and K-12 practitioners throughout the US and Pacific Island nations. Nelson co-authored American Indian Citizenship in Balance - a curriculum unit on the concept of dual citizenship as it applies to American Indian, and currently being used in social studies classrooms in 104 Bureau of Indian Affairs high schools. She was awarded a Taft Fellowship to study American Indian Politics at the University of Montana. (Taft Teacher Institute, New York) Nelson has been a teacher of middle and high school Social Studies and English in California, Utah, Switzerland, and Maryland.