Ariel Parker is the Assistant Director of Education and Diversity for the Center for Engineering MechanoBiology at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD from the Program in Cell, Molecular, Developmental Biology, and Biophysics (CMDB) at Johns Hopkins University, where her interdisciplinary research used the Caenorhabditis elegans dauer exit decision to study how environmental dynamics affect decision-making at the single-neuron level.  After her PhD, she spent two years as a public high school teacher in the School District of Philadelphia. In addition, she has experience in program management, teacher development, recruitment, and event planning.