Christina Ngo

Christina Ngo is the Executive Director of Social Embeddedness at Arizona State University. Christina’s work focuses on advancing the mission of the New American University by evaluating university-wide social embeddedness efforts and initiatives. In this role, she facilitates and amplifies collaborative, mutually beneficial partnerships and innovations across the university and throughout our communities. She is also a faculty associate at ASU's Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions. 

Her portfolio includes working on the university-wide adoption of Collaboratory, a digital platform that allows users to capture the variety of ways ASU staff and faculty work with over 2,0000 individual community partners and organizations to collaboratively address challenges. The platform serves as a connector between different ASU units and community partners.

From 2019-2021, she oversaw the planning and execution of the annual ASU Social Embeddedness Network Conference, a convening of staff, faculty and community partners building connections and sharing best practices for working together and advancing ASU as a socially embedded institution. She is interested in creating innovative learning experiences, connecting people and resources, building new ways of working and weaving whimsy throughout higher education. Christina loves working with leaders and invested stakeholders to create, elevate and recognize mutually beneficial partnerships that benefit education – the single most important lever we have to create better life opportunities for individuals and communities around the world.

Prior to this role, Christina was a 2019-20 University Innovation Fellow at ASU. Prior to the fellowship, she served as a Design Strategist within the Office of Scholarship & Innovation at ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. In this role, she built strategic partnerships to amplify intrapreneurship at the college, leveraging the design process. Christina began her career at ASU working at the intersection of the public and private sectors in Entrepreneurship + Innovation, partnering with the Verizon Foundation to lead a nationwide teacher training program focused on design thinking, entrepreneurship and innovative technologies. Prior to that, she served as a Teach For America corps member, where she taught science and math in underserved communities in Phoenix, Arizona. Her time as a classroom teacher taught her to the importance of leveraging the expertise of community partners from a variety of sectors to improve student learning.  

She was a 2021 ATHENA Young Professional Award finalist, and Arizona Women in Higher Education recognized her as the 2024 Mentor of the Year. Christina is a first-generation college student and received her B.A. in Sociology from The University of Texas at Austin, her M.Ed. in Secondary Education from ASU and her Master’s in Business Administration from the W. P. Carey School of Business at ASU.