Profile

I am excited about advancing great ideas, people, and organizations—known as an action-oriented creative problem solver. I am an organized individual, an excellent communicator, and an active listener with strong coalition-building skills. My passion is learner success, retention, and perseverance through intentional data collection, elegantly-designed learning experiences, deliberate diversity, and supportive leadership.

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Dr. Annie Hale is a Sr. Director at EdPlus, Arizona State University. Annie works on co-developed university-wide solutions that foster student success through research, evaluation, leadership, and innovative learning models and digital teaching to reduce barriers to achievement in higher education. Annie provides organizational leadership to ensure projects move seamlessly between phases and teams. Working through a broad array of topics, Annie networks interdisciplinary research teams to co-inform curriculum development and foster student success, retention, and perseverance through data-driven analytics. From a management perspective, Annie is a strong coalition-builder who works to remove barriers for sharing information and ideas readily. From a development perspective, Annie co-develops and supports meticulously curated high-quality learning content that is aesthetically appealing, engaging, researchable, and deliberately enhances diversity and accessibility to a broad audience through the principle of "elegantly-designed experiences." Student success, retention, inclusion, and accessibility for all learners are motivating factors that span all areas of her portfolio.

Annie's scholarly research spans various topics, including education for sustainability (EfS), science and technology studies (STS), the use of innovative technologies to improve learning experiences, design from a human-centered approach, and transformations in higher education. Annie's research agenda is intentionally connected to her current projects and morphs as she takes on new endeavors. Annie takes on research questions and protocols that co-inform insights from a qualitative and quantitative mixed-methods methodical perspective. 

Annie has been at ASU for more than 13-years as an educational leader and faculty associate and has a decade worth of experience successfully securing grants and philanthropic funding. In the last six years alone, she has brought in more than $1.7M in research awards Before coming to EdPlus in the Fall of 2021, she worked at the Biodesign Insitute for Nobel Laureate Lee Hartwell, Ph.D., for 12 years. Annie still actively collaborates with Lee. Before coming to ASU, Annie worked in the field of architecture as a designer for five years at the influential architecture studio Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill and mobilizes her design acumen in all of her projects from video production to one-pagers. Annie is LEED-certified and is a certified Lean Six Sigma Green Belt from Purdue.

Education and Research

Education: 

• Ph.D. Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology, ASU

• Masters in Science and Technology Policy, ASU

• Professional Masters of Interior Architecture, UCLA

• Bachelor of Arts in Sustainability, ASU

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Annie’s research interests and daily efforts focus on innovative technologies, strategies, and experiences to improve learning and bolster society’s critical and evaluative consumption of science and technology. Annie investigates complicated problems in novel and emerging ways through mixed-method iterative approaches. As a research operations executive lead, Annie organizes various types of researchers to support co-informing data collection strategies through descriptive and analytical methodological processes. Annie organizes and participates in collaborative research efforts that address strategic research challenges. Still, her work always comes back to her overarching research question—How do people construct and understand the world around them, and, in turn, how do those constructs change the way people engage with their world?