Our Team

Dr. Karen Ramirez is the Director of the CU Dialogues Program. She is also a faculty member at CU-Boulder, serving as the Assistant Director for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Program Development for the Miramontes Arts and Sciences Program, which serves underserved students in the College of Arts and Sciences. She received a 2018 Boulder Faculty Assembly Award for Leadership and Service. In 2017 she received the Student Involvement Center's...

Dr. Ellen Aiken co-founded the CU Dialogues Program with Karen Ramirez and served as co-director until her retirement in 2016. Before retiring, she taught interdisciplinary courses in American History at CU with an emphasis on cross-cultural interaction in the American West. She currently serves as a consultant to the CU Dialogues Program. In 2018 she established the CU Dialogues Faculty Fellow Program, which provides summer funding to a faculty member...

Nancy Maingi Ngwu is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at CU. She studies organizational communication. Her research generally engages how organizational actors at the margins of society communicatively organize to manage, resist, and remake oppressive structures. As a practitioner, she designs dialogues on systemic inequities and trains organizational members/leaders to dialogue on and organize toward equitable, diverse and inclusive practices, policies, and procedures. She is currently a...

Jennifer Pacheco is a PhD student in the Learning Sciences and Human Development Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is dedicated to addressing educational inequities and working with communities on health disparities. Jennifer was born and raised in Pueblo, Colorado. Working across the P-20 spectrum in the field of education for over 19 years, Jennifer has served as a bilingual teacher, community activist, college prep advisor, and college...

Stephen Sommer is a dual doctoral candidate in the Learning Sciences and Human Development Program (Education) and the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder.