Madeleine Olson Headshot

Madeleine Olson

Learning Designer

Madeleine Olson is a Learning Designer, supporting and consulting on the design, development, and delivery of instructional materials of MPH programs. She is especially motivated by supporting the School’s educational mission of empowering students with critical consciousness to shape a healthier world.

She earned her B.A. in Critical Studies in Media Arts from Mount Holyoke College and her M.A. in Learning, Design, and Technology from Georgetown University. In order to inform her empathy-based work with faculty, students, and administrators, Madeleine became a BUILD Design Fellow at Desklight, a design-thinking consulting agency, where she developed a passion for human-centered design practices.

Madeleine previously worked at Georgetown University at the Red House, the institution’s incubator for curricular transformation, and the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, the university’s teaching and learning center for excellence. These involvements informed her engagement in equity-based projects. As a result, she served as the DC Ambassador for the Learning Analytics Learning Network and became part of the community of practice called ‘Higher-Ed’s Big Rethink Initiative’ dedicated to higher-education’s way forward and its sustained change since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

She is the author of Subversive Pathways: Your Life as Transformative Design (New Degree Press, 2022), a non-fiction book on applying design-thinking to everyday life.