Chief of Staff The Morton Arboretum | Lisle, Illinois We are pleased to announce the appointment of Karen Magid as the Chief of Staff at The Morton Arboretum. Magid will assume her new role on February 20, 2024.Magid joins the Arboretum from Huston-Tillotson University (HT) in Austin, TX, where she served as the Chief of Staff and Clerk of the Board. After her postdoctoral research, Karen transitioned her career from lab-based research to connect with her passions for the environment and education, serving Huston-Tillotson as the inaugural director of sustainability. She approaches her work with a sharp focus on environmental justice, weaving environmental considerations throughout the university and linking to all aspects of the mission. She co-founded and organized HT’s annual environmental justice conference, the Building Green Justice Forum, and mentored the environmental student group Green is the New Black.Karen has also focused on community-based work as a board member for the Austin-Travis County Food Policy Board, providing advisement and advocacy on the local food system, leading to the inclusion of food goals in the City of Austin Climate Equity Plan and serving on the steering committee for the comprehensive regional food system planning.Karen earned her BS in Electrical Engineering and her MS in Nuclear Engineering from North Carolina State University. Dr. Magid holds a PhD in Materials Science from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied the mechanical properties of metals across length-scales. Her postdoctoral work at the ETH-Zurich continued her focus on materials characterization primarily using x-ray microdiffraction techniques.Jeff Kessner led this search with Annah Wells and Jenny Rubin.