Mouse is pleased to announce some changes aimed at passing the baton of “creative technology for youth” to some of our long-standing Learning Design team members.

Meredith Summs has accepted the position of Senior Director and Interim Chief Learning Officer and will now lead the team. Having served over thirteen years at Mouse, most recently as Director of Youth Engagement, Meredith is a strong leader and has been particularly instrumental in creating and leading the Mouse Design League. She leads all youth events, including Emoti-Con, and all the development work on Mouse Create, supports the Mouse teams working on serious games, wearable tech and similar specialized initiatives, and oversees the day-to-day work of the entire department.

Carlos Leon, Mouse’s Director of Content Development and Training, has repositioned to take on additional ongoing research work. Carlos leads the Educator Engagement team at Mouse, which this past academic year directly trained and supported over 1,100 educators. He leads Mouse’s relationships with, among others, Code.org, Google CS First, and the NYC Department of Education’s CS For All initiative. Working closely with Meredith, Carlos will continue his co-authorship of Mouse’s emerging offerings in “computational thinking across the curriculum.” Carlos will now focus on Mouse’s National Science Foundation efforts as Co-Principal Investigator on Mouse’s current grant proposal to the NSF.

These changes come as Marc Lesser, Mouse’s current Chief Learning Officer, has accepted a new post as Vice President for Research and Technology at NAF (the National Academy Foundation) -- his last day at Mouse will be July 25th, 2019.

During his tenure, Marc fostered a very strong team at Mouse and has partnered closely with Meredith in the creation and deployment of Mouse programming and with Carlos on several research-oriented engagements. Mouse will be forever grateful to Marc for his visionary leadership and his ceaseless work on behalf of the learners, educators, and mentors Mouse serves.

In his eleven years of service, Marc has been the chief architect of Mouse’s programming. Among many other things, he led the launch and continuous improvement of the interactive cloud-based learning platform Mouse Create, which is the backbone of everything Mouse does. Marc also co-founded Emoti-Con, one of the largest youth-focused tech and design showcases in the Northeast, held annually in partnership with the New York Public Library. Marc has been a Co-Principal Investigator on two NSF grants, most recently an ITEST together with DreamYard Project and the Education Development Center. He is a national expert on digital badging and alternative credentialing (especially as these help promote equity and inclusion). Marc also is the inaugural Youth Studies Practitioner Fellow at the CUNY School of Professional Studies and creator of the No Such Thing Podcast -- a leading forum for cutting-edge idea exchange for learning in the digital age.

Wishing him all continued success at NAF, we encourage you to reach out to Marc during his transition: mlesser[at]naf.org, and @malesser on social media and LinkedIn.

Please reach out to Meredith and Carlos during the transition at meredith@mouse.org and carlos.leon@mouse.org if you have any questions or concerns.