Katelynn Kapalo

Kate came to teaching by way of practice. Her doctoral work at the University of Central Florida built 3D visualization tools to help firefighters plan for incidents before arriving on scene, research grounded in ride-alongs, station visits, and the reality that a beautifully designed interface is worthless if no one can use it at 3 a.m. in full turnout gear. She has studied technology where it actually gets used ever since: as a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University supporting the National Institute of Standards and Technology's public safety communications research, as a Research Psychologist for the U.S. Navy's training systems division, and as a Senior User Experience Researcher at Meta, where she translated the behavior of millions of users into decisions engineering teams could act on. She has also served in compliance and leadership roles at the District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department and developed curriculum in data literacy for the National Fire Academy. She is a also an Emergency Medical Technician.

One question runs through all of it: how do we know whether organizations actually do what they say they do? Kate brings that same skepticism to the classroom, where analytics is a practical skill rather than a spectator sport. Students build things, break them, and explain what happened. She is direct about the limits of what AI can do for them, and equally direct that refusing to engage with it is not a strategy. Her goal is that students leave able to look at a number someone hands them and ask the obvious next question: where did this come from, and should I believe it?