A growing global interest in STEM education can have the power to reshape how schools, industries, and communities collaborate, and Courtney Quarterman, a K-16 Innovator and Partnership Strategist and PhD Data Science student, recognizes this advantage and has centered her practice around it. Driven by her vision to connect students to meaningful opportunities, Quarterman has been designing systems aimed at elevating educators and aligning real-world needs with learning experiences.
"It really is about building a STEM ecosystem," she explains. For her, driving innovation begins with a commitment to expanding opportunity and cultivating problem solvers who can shape tomorrow's workforce, and that begins with a quality STEM education.
The concept of a STEM ecosystem serves as a backbone of her approach. By integrating schools, corporate partners, universities, laboratories, and community institutions, Quarterman sees such ecosystems as the infrastructure that can enable students to access high-quality STEM pathways throughout their educational journey.
"Schools may face limitations in time, resources, and bandwidth, while companies may lack the framework to collaborate effectively with educators. I see myself as the mediator between these worlds," Quarterman explains, describing her role in building implementation models and designs that allow every stakeholder to contribute value to the system. These systems, she believes, can help students to explore careers, develop durable skills, and forge the problem-solving mindset that STEM nurtures.
Within this ecosystem model, Quarterman believes that strategic partnerships between learning institutions and innovation partners can become the engine of growth. She emphasizes that these partnerships succeed only when schools and industry share a commitment to expanding access to high-quality STEM education.
"We have to have an aligned mission," Quarterman states. "The goal is to increase access to quality STEM resources, including curricula, teacher training, and exposure to technology." She underscores that durable, long-term partnerships rely on shared goals and a focus on workforce development. According to her, partners must understand how STEM is implemented in classrooms and how it prepares students for industry expectations.
In her view, this alignment is particularly crucial as the world transitions toward an AI-enabled workforce. She believes that the accelerating pace of artificial intelligence has widened the skills gap. "Tomorrow's workers are going to be separated into those who know how to do the work and those who know how to do the work using AI," she says.
Her work embeds data literacy and data science throughout STEM programs. "It's my belief that data science education is about what's under the hood of AI," she explains. "So I make sure that we take an interdisciplinary approach when it comes to embedding data education throughout STEM curricula and beyond. That, I believe, is the secret sauce for effective AI frameworks and student readiness for an AI-enabled workforce."
Using this interdisciplinary approach, she embeds data science across all content areas in K-12 and higher education. From high-performance computing access to collaborations with laboratories, Quarterman aims to foster a global STEM ecosystem for educators and students to build the knowledge needed for an AI-ready future.
This mission is also bolstered by the anticipated deficit of approximately 3.5 million STEM workers in the workforce in 2025 due to skill gaps. "I've come across many industry leaders often wondering what's happening with K-12 education in the US because there is a growing lack of strong talent and candidates," she says. This, she believes, has to be tackled through collaborative partnerships to strengthen teacher readiness and student engagement. "Partnerships matter not only because they improve access to resources but also because they elevate entire talent pipelines," she adds.
Yet merely establishing these partnerships doesn't constitute the entire solution, as Quarterman notes. She insists that sustaining partnerships requires intentional design. "I follow a rubric in my mind when building sustainable partnerships," she notes. "It emphasizes stakeholder buy-in, clear goals, progress monitoring, and collective agency to ensure every stakeholder feels empowered."
She also focuses on establishing "legacy artifacts," which she refers to as platforms, dashboards, and other resources that remain usable even when leadership changes. According to her, this is especially important in under-resourced or marginalized communities and countries where educational continuity is often disrupted. "Creating durable systems could ensure that opportunity does not disappear when teams transition,'' she says.
The global dimension of Quarterman's work is in its early stages, yet it is rapidly expanding. Discovery trips across Africa are shaping her foundation of a global STEM ecosystem designed for cross-cultural learning and shared research. "We're looking to take students over to Africa and bring Liberian and Ghanaian students to the United States," she says, reflecting her commitment to global impact.
As she looks ahead, she envisions creating a tool that guides educational ecosystems around the world in building sustainable STEM and AI-enabled models. Her goal is to close the opportunity gap by giving students, especially those without access, the chance to see themselves in future STEM careers. "If they see it, they can believe that they too can be it," she says.
Through intentional ecosystem building, Courtney Quarterman is shaping the blueprint for STEM education's next era, one defined by collaboration, innovation, and opportunity for every learner.
