Heather Beem

Heather Beem is a native of Oklahoma, and her love of exploration drew her to the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. There she worked at the intersection of biology and engineering, with a backdrop of the limitless ocean. She has found great joy in uncovering the elegance of God’s creation in nature and designing technologies inspired by those discoveries.

Through the graduate program, she found herself immersed in hands-on learning experiences. Since graduating with her Ph.D. in 2015, she has been designing scalable methods to help educators around the globe to similarly engage their students in experiential learning. Her mentor for this article was Ken Kostel, WHOI Web science writer/editor.