Jessica Johnson is the new Director for STEM and Student Engagement at ODU-VMASC. She’s a lover of all things learning: cognitive neuroscience, analytics, agile feedback, human-centered design, memory, motivation, and engagement. She’s a professional optimist and creative thinker- always eager to create experiential and STEM/STEAM+H learning opportunities for all learners.

In addition to this new role, she also serves the Digital Ship program at VMASC as a Curriculum Coordinator. She is a cognitive and educational psychologist with an expertise in immersive learning experience design. Her doctoral research encompasses self-regulated learning and executive functioning behaviors within immersive learning environments, serious educational games, and adaptive instructional systems.

Her passion is connecting students and educators K-20+ to advanced learning technologies. She has served as a STEM coordinator, instructional designer, curriculum developer, and educator implementing content for training, professional development, and various STEM programming at the state, local, and national levels. She has served on numerous conferences, serious game design, social and educational sciences, national modeling and simulation organizations, and STEM workforce development committees.

Her goals for STEM and Student Engagement at VMASC are:
• Establishing and fostering educational partnerships
• Creating meaningful research pipelines and pathways at VMASC for students
• Serving faculty and colleagues’ visions for STEM/STEAM+H programming
• Development of new STEM/STEAM+H outreach mechanisms
• Support regional initiatives in collaboration with academic and industry partners

Over the past three years working at VMASC, Jessica’s greatest accomplishment has been establishing a wide berth of educational and industry partnerships. “I am grateful for the collaborations and innovative projects developed thus far!” Jessica said. “I’m so honored to work alongside PHENOMENAL research faculty, project scientists, students, and staff. It is a pleasure working amongst such diverse team members- whose individual expertise brings out the best in all.”