Liz Nilsen is the Acting Director of the Agile Strategy Lab at UNA, following four years at the Agile Strategy Lab at Purdue. Liz’s passion is for helping teams become engines of innovation for their organization, community, or region. Liz teaches (online and in-person), shepherds the expansion of the Lab’s programming, and oversees partnerships with other organizations interested in deploying agile strategy tools. She is a co-author of Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership (Wiley, 2019).

She is a former senior program officer at VentureWell, where she provided leadership to the Pathways program for the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter), which guided 50 colleges and universities in redesigning undergraduate engineering education.

Prior to joining VentureWell, she led STEM initiatives at the Penn State Center – Pittsburgh, was the southwest regional coordinator for the Pennsylvania STEM Network, and served as Director of Outreach and New Economy Program Development at the Institute of Advanced Learning & Research, a Virginia Tech initiative. She earned her BA from Stanford and an MBA from Northeastern University, and is midway through study for a PhD in organizational leadership from Eastern University.