Vanessa serves as Treasurer of the Board for The Next Step Public Charter School. She brings to this role a wealth of experience as a finance and operations leader within the education sector, as well as board experience in multiple capacities.

Vanessa is currently the Chief Operations Officer at Transcend Education. In this role, Vanessa is tasked with building and integrating the organization’s strategy, finance, talent, human resources, legal operations, and staff technology functions to further the organization’s mission to support school communities to create and spread extraordinary, equitable learning environments.

Prior to joining Transcend, Vanessa spent a decade at Teach For America (TFA), where she served in multiple capacities to build and maintain strong, sustainable, and equitable operations. During her tenure at TFA, she oversaw some of the organization’s most complex cross-functional projects involving finance, people/human resources, technology, legal, risk/compliance, and real estate functions.

Vanessa began her career in architecture and brings to her work many of the innovative and user-centered practices she developed early on as a designer. She has a B.A. in Architecture and Urban Studies from Yale College and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. She currently lives in Takoma Park, MD, with her husband, Brandon, and son, Miles.