Ruth Wylie

Ruth Wylie is the co-director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where she is also associate research professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, and a senior global futures scientist at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. She pursues interdisciplinary, translational research projects that leverage knowledge and insights from theory and laboratory studies to answer real-world problems, especially in the areas of educational technology, futures thinking, and applied imagination.

From 2022 through 2024, Ruth led the Arizona STEM Acceleration Project (ASAP), which provided 900+ fellowships to K–12 teachers across the state, preparing them to deliver high-quality, hands-on STEM activities, and worked to enhance the state’s ecosystem of educators and professional learning organizations. ASAP was supported by a $10m grant from the Arizona Department of Education, and the project received ASU’s President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness in 2024. She has developed and led projects funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the World Bank, the Spencer Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, among others.

A major element of Ruth’s research and outreach work is designing and facilitating collaborative imagination workshops, guiding interdisciplinary teams through an imaginative process to address particular challenges at the intersection of science, technology, and society. These workshops have involved funding from, and collaboration with, groups ranging from the Smithsonian Institution and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Society for Scholarly Publishing. In 2021, she co-authored “Collaborative Imagination: A Methodological Approach,” an article in the journal Futures, describing the “Imaginative Collaborative Framework” that serves as a foundation for these workshops.

She is the co-director of the Solar Tomorrows project, which has produced two books tracing pathways to possible solar futures: The Weight of Light (2019) and Cities of Light (2021). She co-edited Imagining Transmedia, a collection of essays published by the MIT Press in 2024, for which she also co-authored a chapter, “Frankenmedia: Using Narrative and Play in Informal Transmedia Learning Environments.” Her writing has appeared in journals including Frontiers in Psychology, AI  & Society, Science & Education, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, British Journal of Educational Technology, Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, Science and Children, Research in Schools, Cognitive Science, and Science and Engineering Ethics.

Ruth earned a master’s degree and PhD in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was a Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER) fellow. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science at the University of California, Berkeley, with minors in Computer Science and Education. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Micki Chi at Arizona State University. After completing her undergraduate work, she taught English at Shima High School in Isobe, Japan.