Who We Are

Shamini is a teaching artist, transdisciplinary explorer, and imagination advocate. She explores and develops frameworks and fosters transdisciplinary mindsets for a complex, rapidly moving, and unpredictable world. She brings together complexity, systems, imagination, and design thinking for co-creative and reflexive work grounded in ethical purpose toward social good and flourishing. Her work includes creative facilitation for leadership in complexity. Shamini draws from her life-world and journey as a transdisciplinary scholar in contemplative embodied learning, literature, storytelling and theatre, semiotics, sense-making and communication, and learning sciences.

Shamini integrated transdisciplinary principles and transformative pedagogies in founding CGU’s unique Preparing Future Faculty program (now part of CAFÉ) for inclusive, equity-minded deep learning. She is also Editor of the open-access Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal hosted at the Claremont Colleges that invites multiple voices to share work in arts integration with STEM, Social Science, and the Humanities. In her consulting work, Shamini facilitates and coaches writing, creative writing, and presentation design and communication.

“My goal is to provide connective, integrative opportunities for our students to take up the transdisciplinary challenge to cross boundaries between disciplines and beyond academia, to connect mind, heart, and purpose as scholar-practitioners passionate about bringing flourishing into being in a complex and emergent world”

Shamini is an alumna of CGU and holds a PhD in Education. Her first two degrees were in Linguistics and English Literature from the National University of Singapore.

Richard has worked as a video store clerk, autobody technician, alpine ski lift operator, certified alpine ski instructor, and AP US, European, and World History tutor. Richard has also worked as an adjunct instructor for CGU’s School for Arts and Humanities digital humanities program. From 2013 to 2016, Richard worked as the project manager for the Power Struggles project, funded by the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, under former CGU Research Associate Professor, Hal T. Nelson, before taking his current position as assistant director of the Transdisciplinary Studies Program.

Richard comes to transdisciplinarity by way of his disparate work history, his fascination with the expansiveness of history, and his interest in how diverse disciplinary experiences can help us, collectively, cross boundaries to solve problems and tell new stories.

Nihaad Saleem

Masters Student, Center for Information Systems & Technology

Automation and Product Management Fellow.

Michelle Blaya-Burgo

Doctoral Student, Psychology

Program Assessment and Evaluation Fellow.

Edwin Urbina

Masters Student, Transdisciplinary Analysis

STEAM+ Journal. Research Fellow.