COURTNEY FALATO

Smart Cities Relationship Director

The Ohio State University (USA)

Courtney Falato is the Smart Cities Relationship Director at The Ohio State University, facilitating the university’s role as the lead research partner of Smart Columbus, and leading the university-wide smart campus initiative.

Ms. Falato’s career has focused on education, research and technology, most recently serving as an administrator in innovative roles at two high-performing central Ohio school districts. She most recently served as the first Chief Innovation Officer for Dublin City Schools, where she led the democratization of design thinking, computer science and career exposure experiences across a 15,000-student district. Prior to that, she was Reynoldsburg City Schools’ first Director of Innovation, where she lead the work of the district’s five STEM schools and developed a district-wide maker education program, established K12 career pathways and led the development and implementation of a K12 work plan for computer science education.

Ms. Falato’s career began in research an education researcher at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) in Washington DC. There, she managed $400 million in grant submissions while also collecting, analyzing and synthesizing data for federal monitoring reports for the US Department of Education. In 2008, she joined Ohio State’s Battelle Center for Mathematics and Science Education Policy as the Associate Director of STEM projects. While there, she was part of a national research team studying the implementation, spread and sustainability of STEM school models across the country. While an Associate Project Director at the University of Chicago’s Center for Elementary Mathematics and Science Education (CEMSE), Ms. Falato focused on K12 computer science education research, co-authoring a foundational report for the current computer science education movement titled Building and Operating System for Computer Science Education (2011).  

Ms. Falato received her B.A. in Political Science from Ohio State and her M.Ed. from the University of Virginia.