Liz Nilsen

Liz Nilsen is an Executive Advisor to the Agile Strategy Lab at UNA, following four years at the Agile Strategy Lab at Purdue. Liz’s passion is for helping teams become engines of innovation for their organization, community, or region.  Liz works with organizations interested in deploying agile strategy tools, teaches (online and in-person), and conducts research on teams and collaboration. She is a co-author of Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership (Wiley, 2019).

Liz is a Strategic Doing Fellow, and is also certified to administer the AEM-Cube to assess cognitive diversity and the psychological safety tool popularized by Amy Edmondson. She is also certified in the Rapid Improvement process. She teaches and presents to audiences across the US and beyond.

Liz is a former senior program officer at VentureWell, where she provided leadership to the Pathways program for the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter), which guided 50 colleges and universities in redesigning undergraduate engineering education.

Prior to joining VentureWell, she led STEM initiatives at the Penn State Center – Pittsburgh, and served as Director of Outreach and New Economy Program Development at the Institute of Advanced Learning & Research, a Virginia Tech initiative. She earned her BA from Stanford, an MBA from Northeastern University, and a Ph.D. in organizational leadership from Eastern University, with a dissertation focused on team performance factors.