Carolyn Wood directs the school’s program on Strengthening Learning and Teaching Excellence (SLATE) and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Case Program.  She also conducts institutional research, coordinates the Kennedy School’s academic areas, and supports the Faculty Steering Committee which provides curriculum oversight as well as broader strategic advice to the Dean.

In addition to her administrative roles, Carolyn works with Professor Linda Bilmes to teach an experiential learning course on Advanced Applied Budgeting where student teams spend a full semester conducting real-world financial projects for a local municipal government.  Together with Doug Ahlers, Carolyn helped establish the Broadmoor Project, a partnership between the Harvard Kennedy School and the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans to help support and capture lessons from community-based recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  To date the Broadmoor Project has sent more than 90 Harvard students to work in Broadmoor through spring break projects, summer internships, and a new course on Disaster Recovery Management and Urban Development which includes a January field module in Broadmoor.

Previously, Carolyn served five years as the Associate Director of Finance at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she helped to reverse a $6M operating deficit and establish a $2M unrestricted cash reserve fund.  Prior to that, she served as Vice President for Research at the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), a non-profit founded by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter.  She holds a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she focused on economic development planning.

Patricia Garcia-Rios is a film & video writer and producer with fifteen years’ experience in documentaries for PBS. She worked for ten years at WGBH-Boston, developing a broad range of skills in the areas of visual and written storytelling. She has acted as producer and co-producer on the series Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? (PBS, 2008), They Made America (PBS, 2004), Reconstruction: The Second Civil War (PBS, 2004), and Chicago: City of the Century (PBS, 2003). In 2005 she was nominated for a Writers Guild award for Reconstruction.

Ms. Garcia-Rios was a print journalist in her native Spain.  She began her career in documentaries in the early 1990s at the legendary production company Blackside, Inc. of Eyes on the Prize fame.  Her work on the landmark series Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery (PBS, 1998) earned her an Emmy in the category of research. 

Recently, she has acted as writing and story consultant on several documentaries for film and television, among them Our Disappeared (PBS, forthcoming), Traces of the Trade (Sundance Film Festival/POV, 2008), The Borinqueneers (PBS, 2007), Buddy (2005), and Damrell’s Fire (PBS, 2005).

Ms. Garcia-Rios has a Master’s degree in Broadcast Journalism from Boston University and a BA in Journalism from Universidad Complutense, Madrid.

Pamela Varley has spent the last 25 years as a researcher, writer and editor, focusing on topics of general public interest. In the early 1980s, she worked for three years as a reporter for the Cambridge Chronicle—covering city politics, housing policy, and the public school system—and for an additional year as a Boston freelance writer. Since 1985, she has worked as a casewriter at the Kennedy School of Government (with an 18-month hiatus between 1996 and 1997).

Ms. Varley’s published cases include: “The Urban League Adjusts to a Post-Civil Rights Landscape”; “Tradition Transformation and a Divided Spirit: A 21st Century Quandary for the American Red Cross”; “Command Peformance: County firefighters take charge of the 9/11 Pentagon Emergency”; “The City of Chicago and the 1995 Heat Wave”; “Battling for Rule of Law in Mexico City: Crime, Corruption, and Criminal Justice.”

In 1991, she won the Stephen Ballinger Hitchner Case Prize for the case study, “Jesse Helms v. Harvey Gantt: Race, Culture and Campaign Strategy in the 1990 Senate Battle,” and again in 1993 for the case study “Responding to Disaster: The Story of the Guadalajara Sewer Explosion.” In 1996-1997, Varley directed a major research project for the Investor Responsibility Research Center. As part of that project, she edited a four-part, 594-page book, called The Sweatshop Quandary: Corporate Responsibility on the Global Frontier, which was praised for its clarity and accessibility. Varley received a BA in English Literature from Oberlin College in 1979.