Professional Bio

Kirsten Ellenbogen is the Director of Evaluation and Research in Learning at the Science Museum of Minnesota. She began her work in museums as a demonstrator at the Detroit Science Center in 1987. Her award-winning exhibition development work has focused on inquiry experiences, multimedia interactives, and dual-purpose spaces appropriate for both school and family groups. She was the project director of the Center for Informal Learning & Schools at King’s College London at its inception. She was also an affiliated researcher of the Museum Learning Collaborative. Most recently, she was a Senior Associate at the Institute for Learning Innovation where she was the principal investigator of an NSF-funded initiative designed to coalesce the last decade of research on learning in museums into frameworks for practitioners. She has served the field as a founding officer of the Informal Learning Environments Research SIG-American Education Research Association, senior chair of the Informal Science Education Strand-National Association for Research in Science Teaching, training coordinator of the Visitor Studies Group (UK), and is the current president-elect of the Visitor Studies Association. She also has been appointed to the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Learning Science in Informal Environments. She received her Ph.D. in Science Education from Vanderbilt University and her B.A. from the University of Chicago.

Expertise & Interest Descriptors

role of museums in family life, science talk, public deliberation and debate about science, civic engagement, policymakers' use of science research, visualizing complex scientific data, visitor studies, human-computer interaction

Planned Conference Participation

Attending :: ASTC Annual Conference 2008
October 18-21, 2008

Attending :: 103rd AAM Annual Meeting and Museum Expo 2009
April 30 - May 4, 2009