Hello! Thanks for stopping by to check out my site. My name is Karen and I love helping people achieve positive change by increasing their mastery of language, culture, and communication skills. It is very gratifying seeing people I work with grow professionally and increase their communicative confidence.

As a corporate communication coach, I draw on my academic, professional, and life experience. During childhood, I traveled with my family quite a bit and started grade school on Okinawa, where we lived for three years due to my father’s work as an Air Force pilot. In college, I studied for a year in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. After graduating, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in Central Africa. After grad school, I taught English at a college in Micronesia.

I majored in French with an art minor and received a Master's in Teaching English as a Second Language from UCLA. In addition to French, I furthered my understanding of foreign languages by studying Spanish, Italian, Russian, and the Central African language Sango.

I have taught ESL and writing skills at the postgraduate level for many years in several colleges and universities and eventually began working as a communication skills consultant and trainer based in Silicon Valley. I have developed a variety of training programs, from English classes for assemblers to high-level professional communication skills for tech workers.

My current focus is on creating targeted 1:1 communication coaching for native and non-native English speakers mainly in technical, scientific, and financial organizations. I embrace the environment of remote learning, am certified in Distance Education, and enjoy connecting with the clients I coach virtually. An additional focus for the coming months is developing and sharing a greater understanding of how women communicate at work, and how the workplace can evolve to be more richly inclusive.