Case Study: From an unaddressed problem to a funded Princeton program that changed curricula

The challenge

In the aftermath of the notable events of 2020, universities nationwide scrambled to respond to renewed attention on societal inequity — almost universally with unconscious-bias training and interpersonal-tolerance workshops focused on individual attitudes and behavior. What was missing everywhere was a program that addressed something different and, in engineering and technology fields specifically, more consequential: how systems, algorithms, and processes can end up inaccurate or ineffective at solving the problems they’re built for, or create new problems, when they’re designed without understanding the societal realities they operate within.

This is a textbook “wicked problem” — no clear boundaries, no agreed-upon definition, no template solution, where even naming it correctly is most of the battle. That’s exactly why it had gone unaddressed everywhere else, and why nothing comparable existed at any other university in the country.

The key insight

As I put it at the time: understanding structural realities isn’t a soft-skills add-on to innovation work — it’s foundational to getting the work right at all. It’s like trying to fathom the universe without knowing about carbon. Scientists using a carbon-less periodic table of the elements would have a fundamentally wrong understanding of how stars work, how old a fossil actually is, how photosynthesis functions, what living things are made of. Build an innovation without accounting for structural realities, and the risk isn’t just an unfair outcome — it’s a solution built on an incomplete model of how the world actually works, one that may fail at the very thing it was meant to do.

What I did

I identified this need and built the program entirely on my own initiative — no one asked for it, and there was no existing mandate to fill it.

The program combined a half-day webinar with a day-and-a-half interactive workshop, delivered by an outside company I brought in, where participants worked through multiple rounds of current and historical data in breakout groups, then researched and presented findings back to the full group. From there, the cohort met monthly for expert presentations followed by facilitated discussion. To make people comfortable engaging honestly with a genuinely sensitive subject, I built in ways for participants to ask questions and give feedback anonymously throughout. Every participant was also tasked with identifying and implementing a real structural solution in their own workplace, classroom, or research lab — not just attending a training, but doing something with it.

How I got it adopted

Doing this meant navigating a genuinely sensitive topic while also selling the idea itself — to faculty chairs, faculty, the Dean of the School of Engineering, the Provost’s Office, postdocs, and staff across the university. Getting it funded and adopted required as much stakeholder alignment and persuasion as it did subject-matter thinking.

The hardest part of that persuasion wasn’t the funding ask — it was framing. The moment people heard the topic, many assumed this was another round of the unconscious-bias and interpersonal-tolerance training that had already saturated higher ed for decades. It wasn’t, and the distinction mattered: this program had nothing to do with individual attitudes or behavior, and everything to do with how systems and technologies are actually built. Getting stakeholders past that first assumption took as much work as designing the program itself.

I conceived and secured $174K in funding for the program — engaging Princeton faculty, postdocs, and staff over three years, reaching 75 participants.

Results

• Reception was strong enough that multiple faculty revised their curricula, and one created an entirely new course inspired by the program
• Recognized with the Tiger Award, the highest honor for School of Engineering staff at Princeton
• Led to conversations with the Provost’s Office about scaling the program campus-wide

What this demonstrates

• Taking on a genuinely difficult, easy-to-avoid problem entirely on my own initiative, with no mandate to do so
• Persuading skeptical, senior stakeholders across an entire organization — not just pitching an idea, but getting it funded and adopted
• Naming a wicked problem clearly enough that people could actually act on it, not just discuss it