Meet Nadia M. Akhtar
What brought you or led you to TerraLuna? How did you get here?
I have always described my ideal career as a professional student. As a graduate student at Michigan I learned to blend the complexity of the real world with methodology and structure. I learned that both rigor and heart resulted in the best kind of outcome - change. Through my degree in Biostatistics, I exchanged my love for the black and white, for the complex and ever changing. As a statistician and an observer or the world around me, I found purpose in using evidence (traditional and non-traditional) to communicate complexities to communities and leaders alike, to empower change through understanding.
My journey led me to Seattle where I worked on cancer prevention models, infectious disease studies and epidemiological studies. After a few years, missing my family and wanting a professional home that allowed for more growth and ownership, I came back to Minnesota. I worked with health data to motivate behavior change and found myself managing a product that supported clinicians. Through that experience, I learned about working with others and more about myself. My love of education led me to the University of Minnesota where I learned that a small firm, TerraLuna, was entrenched in evaluation of school-based interventions. I made some phone calls and convinced a few members to meet with me. I offered my skill set and found myself on my first evaluation project. Immediately I found a balance between the need to be accurate and precise about data collection and analysis and the emphasis of the practicality and use of the results. Communicating WHAT we learned was central to ensuring that lessons were learned and programmers were empowered to achieve the best outcomes for their students. The framework of evaluation that TerraLuna has always used has been deeply rooted in the responsibility to various stakeholders of the system, not just those at the top. It requires a hard look at the world view people hold and how that shapes their actions.
Why has it become your evaluation/facilitation home? Why did you commit, stay, choose to become a member? What about why we choose to work this way?
For my colleagues - TerraLuna is and continues to be a place where individual voice is celebrated, unique skills are elevated, and creativity is necessary to both view and observe the complex world we live in and communicate that complexity in a way that leads to impact.
Personally and professionally, I have a responsibility to continue to investigate how and why we choose certain actions over others, and how those actions have outcomes that we may or may not intend. In TerraLuna, I have found the emphasis on the pause - that space between action and reaction where everything can change. I found this to be a place where colleagues become humans, where data is not just numeric, and where recognizing complexity and uncertainty is the norm. We don’t blanket discomfort with predictability and controlLeaning into these realities motivates me to be thoughtful, diligent, and creative in co-creating solutions for change.