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 officiomember 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.
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.
Sophia is a junior majoring in Data Science and double minoring in Design and Marketing. She previously served as a Product Designer for the Global TIES Schoolhouse Ghana project. She is a 2024-25 Strauss Foundation Scholar.
Xiaohan Li
Xiaohan Li is a third-year student majoring in Cognitive Science and minoring in English Literature. She is interested in working on projects at the intersection of the arts and sciences. ENG 100D introduced her to Global TIES and the Center. In her free time, Xiaohan enjoys reading, rock climbing, listening to music, and exploring with her friends.
