Came for the Degree,
Never Left
She arrived at Thunderbird as an MBA student, finished in 2004, and joined the staff the following spring. She has been an Executive Director there ever since.
Thunderbird School of Global Management · part of ASU
Thunderbird is a school of international management in Phoenix. She has had one leadership role there the whole time, renamed as the work grew: Thunderbird for Good, then Global Development, then Global Impact, and since March 2026, Global Impact and AI.
Still Learning
On Purpose
A PhD begun in 2022, part time, alongside a full-time job. She is studying creativity and AI: how people build with these tools, and how they decide what is worth making.
Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology
The questions she keeps returning to: how people building with AI develop judgment, how artists navigate it while the rules are still being written, and how any of us decide what we will and will not hand over to a machine. She is still exploring, and enjoying that more than she expected to. The shape on this page is not finished either.
An Alarming Number
of Side Projects
Games, tools, music, small software. Built at night, usually with AI, frequently for an audience of one.
kellie.ai
An app that gives everyone at an event a colored shape and sends them off to find their match. A game that merges words into bigger words. A tool that settles the argument about where to eat. A branching story about who gets the water in Phoenix in 2050. Most were made in evenings. The professional version is the Thunderbird AI Hatchery, which she started in 2026: paid student fellows, real clients, real stakes.
Makes Things
A pottery class over Memorial Day weekend, 2022.
Once a week ever since. Mugs, bowls, plates.
Small things, carefully glazed.
Wheel-thrown · every week
She has been quietly replacing everything in her kitchen with things she made. The surplus is the problem. Every April, the year's pots go out under the carport and the neighbors take whatever calls to them. They are free, though donations to Chele's Cat Care are encouraged. People come back every year to add to their collection.
Happy to Go
Product lines across Europe, Asia and Latin America. Then twenty years of programs built with partners on the ground. Most of the work has happened in other people's countries, which she considers the luckiest part of it.
Working across borders since the 1990s
She started crossing borders for work early and never really stopped. The programs she builds only work because of the people who run them on the other end, and getting to know those people has been the best part of the job. It is an unusual way to spend a career, and she knows how few people get to do it.
Not Sexy but
Extremely Formative
Seven years in the industrial cleaning industry, across two companies, developing worker training systems. She also created a line of industrial degreasers, and got her first taste of working globally.
Industrial cleaning · the 1990s
She helped build a worker training system and then extended it into health care, schools, airports, manufacturing, hospitality and retail. The materials were colorful and playful on purpose. People enjoyed them, which meant they paid attention, and attention is what keeps a job site safe. She also took a line of seven industrial degreasers from formulation to market. Unglamorous industry, and the most creatively formative stretch of her early career.
Keeps Setting
Up Shop
She started out in retail and did not love it. What stuck was the part where you set up a shop, hire people, and teach them to run it. She has done that three times now.
Santa's Workshop · ThunderShop · the AI Hatchery
Her first job ever was retail, and so was her first job out of college. The best of it was Santa's Workshop, a shop inside the store where small children came to buy presents for their parents. She hired the seasonal staff and trained them. Years later she took over ThunderShop, an abandoned campus store at Thunderbird, and taught students to run it. In 2026 she asked for the AI Hatchery and hired student fellows. Different shop every time, same job: hire people who are just starting out, and teach them to run the place.
Statistically
Festive
Five years of retail turned her against Christmas music. The same songs, every shift, for five years. Later she took it back on purpose, and built something worth listening to.
A homemade mix every year since 2000
Every year since 2000, without missing one, a homemade holiday mix, rebuilt deliberately around the unusual and the genuinely listenable rather than the standards that were piped at her for five years straight. Lately she has been making her own, with AI, as The KringleTones.