Nichole Pinkard

Nichole Pinkard is associate professor in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University and faculty director of the Office Community Education Partnerships. She is the founder of Digital Youth Network and L3, 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, and City of Learning with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel), 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.

Pinkard received 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.