Colleen is an education administration professional with a strong passion for social justice, youth engagement, languages, and religious and cross-cultural dialogue. She first came to love the MENA region as a study abroad student in Spain in 2005, and after serving in the Peace Corps in a small town outside of Marrakech, Morocco.In 2013, Colleen completed her Master’s in Intercultural Communication (ICC) at the University of Pennsylvania where she collaborated closely with faculty and students to design a graduate level course that focuses on training design and experiential learning. During her time at Penn, she presented at intercultural conferences including SIETAR-USA and the American University Annual Conferences on Intercultural Relations. She was also the recipient of a Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) grant from the US Department of State, and studied Modern Standard Arabic, Gulf Colloquial Arabic, and Levantine Arabic during her grad school years.Colleen moved back to Morocco in 2014, and became the Program Officer for Intercultural Learning at AMIDEAST in 2015. As part of this role, she led efforts to develop intercultural and diversity trainings for high school and university exchange students in Morocco, including re-designing curriculum for a college-level intercultural course. She also became a founding member of the True North Intercultural Educators Community. Currently she manages AMIDEAST Morocco's entire Education Abroad portfolio, supervising a staff of six.=====Colleen's professional strengths include (http://on.gallup.com/1i5OXhq):Input: People who are especially talented in the Input theme have a craving to know more. Often they like to collect and archive all kinds of information.Adaptability: People who are especially talented in the Adaptability theme prefer to "go with the flow."​ They tend to be "now"​ people who take things as they come and discover the future one day at a time.Intellection: People who are especially talented in the Intellection theme are characterized by their intellectual activity. They are introspective and appreciate intellectual discussions.Developer: People who are especially talented in the Developer theme recognize and cultivate the potential in others. They spot the signs of each small improvement and derive satisfaction from these improvements.Empathy: People who are especially talented in the Empathy theme can sense the feelings of other people by imagining themselves in others'​ lives or others' situations.