About

I like traveling, learning, exploring.

I’m interested in international development and particularly in the intersection of development and technology. Knowledge management and systems theory are other areas of interest.  Once in a blue moon, pricy, pretty shoes make me question my expected salary/school-loan ratio decisions.

This summer I’m at the Millennium Village project in Sauri, Kenya. We write about our experience here. During the school year I co-chair the New Media Task Force, which facilitates activities around ICT for development, and which I truly love. As part of this community, I had the opportunity to travel to Suriname to work with UNICEF to explore how mobile phones and rugged computing might be used to improve education in the interior. This spring we launched the first application of Ushahidi at Columbia University and trained close to 100 students to monitor and map disaster information for use in responding to earthquake damage in Chile.

This fall I’ll be going into my second year in the Masters in Development Practice program at Columbia’s SIPA. It’s  a field-oriented program which emphasizes the relationship of health, infrastructure, agriculture, and education within development. Although heavily influenced by Jeff Sachs, it is not quite a cloaning program designed to perpetuate his “intellectual empire”. However, I wouldn’t mind so much. I bet he can afford a lot of shoes.

Previously, I worked at Rotary International, connecting Rotary club projects, from avoidable blindness teams in India to health clinics in Brazil, with local and international resources and also trained Rotary officers on policy and administrative duties. I supported my non-profit habit by moonlighting as a problem solver for Vibes Media, a mobile marketing company.

I can be reached at jaclyn(dot)carlsen(at)gmail(dot)com and followed on too many social media sites:

linkedin.com/in/jaclyncarlsen  |  facebook.com/jaclyn.carlsen  |  twitter.com/JaclynLeigh  |  delicious.com/JaclynLeigh