Laura Arndt is founder and executive director of Global GreenSTEM. She works with educators and students to create purposeful, relevant GreenSTEM experiences that inspire and empower learners of all cultures and identities to understand and change the world. Laura’s goal is to create opportunities for understanding and empathy between people and their natural environment through active learning and positive action. She customizes educational experiences to local environmental issues, to targeted STEM concepts or skills, and to the learners’ culture, interests, and concerns.

Her life-long curiosity about, celebration of, and respect for the environment and for people of all cultures began as a child growing up in the state of Missouri (USA). She lives, works, and raised her children near Denver, Colorado, surrounded by a ponderosa pine forest on the ancestral land of the Ute, Cheyenne and Oceti Sakowin.

In formal education, Laura currently works with Guam Department of Education to create systemic instructional change by facilitating island-relevant professional learning experiences for the K-12 STEM program. She also works with Indigenous educators to co-develop a unique Indigenized STEAM curriculum for American Indian Academy of Denver that teaches conventional science, math, and technology through the lens of Indigenous Ways of Knowing. She co-facilitates professional learning with Indigenous colleagues that focus on Indigenized problem- and project-based learning experiences, social and restorative justice, and data-driven decision-making.

In informal education, Laura has worked with zoos, museums, state parks, nature centers, government agencies, and national and international environmental/wildlife organizations.

She has worked with organizations that include Captain Planet Foundation, New Mexico STEAMing Ahead, Biomimicry Institute, and India STEM Alliance to develop purposeful solutions-based GreenSTEM action projects and learning experiences. She is working with the Ugandan Conservation Through Public Health to help expand their mountain gorilla conservation projects to include and empower the students and youth of the villages next to the forest. She dedicated two decades, starting in the mid 1980s, to developing and implementing gorilla-forest conservation education programs and curricula with several other international mountain gorilla organizations.

Laura’s consulting is enriched by fifteen years of teaching high school science and elementary science/ GreenSTEM. She presents at conferences, schools, and organizational meetings nationally and internationally. She has authored the NSTA Press curriculum Using Forensics: Wildlife Crime Scene and has written articles for a variety of professional education publications.