Leadership
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Mandy Bratton
Executive Director and Continuing Lecturer
Dr. Mandy Bratton serves as the Executive Director of the UC San Diego Center for Global Sustainable Development. The Center is home to the award-winning Global Ties program and the National Academy of Engineering's (NAE) Global Changemaker Scholars Program. These programs inspire students to collaborate with communities to co-create innovative solutions to urgent problems, such as those represented by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the NAE Grand Challenges. Mandy also serves as a Founding Director of the UC San Diego Changemaker Institute. She is an Ashoka U Change Leader and was instrumental in making UC San Diego an Ashoka U Changemaker Campus – one of only 45 worldwide. She served as the Principal Investigator for SISTERS, a National Science Foundation-funded project to design and study the impact of an after-school STEAM program for 5th and 6th-grade girls facilitated by undergraduate mentors majoring in STEM. Before coming to UC San Diego, Mandy earned a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and served as a senior faculty member in Psychology and Human Development and Interim Associate Dean at Prescott College for the Liberal Arts, the Environment, and Social Justice. She also earned a Public Leadership Credential from the JFK School of Government at Harvard University. Mandy has sailed around the world three times with the Semester at Sea Global Studies Program and serves as president emeritus of its alumni association and as an ex officio member of its Board of Trustees. She holds an academic appointment as a Continuing Lecturer. Her primary interests as a scholar, teacher, practitioner, and global citizen include sustainable development, gender, leadership, ethics, and advancing social and environmental justice.
Lecturer
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Anh- Thu Ngo
Continuing Lecturer
Dr. Anh-Thu Ngo is a Continuing Lecturer with Global TIES. She became involved with service learning as a college student through Princeton’s Community-Based Learning Initiative. She studied Anthropology, which has been a natural conduit for direct community-based research and learning. After college, she participated in a six-week, hands-on irrigation project with Engineers Without Borders in rural Arsi Negele in southeastern Ethiopia. She then earned her Ph.D. at Harvard in Social Anthropology, where she conducted field research as a Fulbright grantee in Vietnam. As a doctoral student, she was a teaching assistant for Dr. Paul Farmer’s popular undergraduate course on Global Health and later developed her own at The College of New Jersey. She has worked with a variety of education nonprofits and has sustained engagement with the public interest sector. Anh-Thu recently re-settled to California from the New York metro area, by way of Austin, Texas.
Undergraduate Teaching Assistants
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Sameera Agarwala
Sameera is a third-year Computer Science major with a Specialization in Bioinformatics. She is passionate about leveraging biomedical innovation and sustainable design to improve global health outcomes. As a Global Changemaker Scholar, she aims to address SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being) by developing affordable, sustainable healthcare solutions, recognizing that lack of access to medical technology is a major barrier to quality care. She is also dedicated to tackling the NAE Grand Challenge: Advance Health Informatics, exploring data-driven technologies that can enhance patient care, improve medical device accessibility, and ultimately reduce healthcare disparities worldwide. In the future, Sameera envisions herself at the forefront of medical device innovation, through research or industry, developing solutions that bridge healthcare disparities and improve health outcomes worldwide. -
Shreya Hiremath
Shreya is a fourth-year Cognitive Science major with a specialization in Machine Learning. She is passionate about giving back to the community and contributing to meaningful projects that make an impact. As a TA for Global Ties, she hopes to inspire students to engage with pressing global challenges and recognize the role technology can play in solving them. She is dedicated to addressing SDG 4 (Quality Education) by exploring how machine learning can make learning more personalized, accessible, and equitable for students around the world. In the future, Shreya envisions herself in academic research, at the intersection of AI and human cognition, developing tools that push the boundaries of scientific discovery and create lasting impact.