Karen Purcell is Project Leader for Celebrate Urban Birds, a  citizen science project at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology that has engaged over 250,000 participants and nearly 10,000 partner organizations. She also led Project PigeonWatch and Urban Bird Gardens, an NSF funded planning grant designed to develop a new model for bringing participatory STEM education to placed-at-risk Latino families. Karen was raised in Chile, South America and came to the U.S. to attend Cornell University. Soon after graduating she spent five years in New York studying and performing under scholarship from Merce Cunningham. She has worked with adults and youth as an English as a Second Language teacher,  a public school teacher, and as a foster-care educator with at-risk teens.  She has been at the Cornell Lab for 15 years concentrating much of her efforts in developing programs and partnerships to engage and support Latino audiences in the sciences and the arts. She is also a co-founder of Tandemonium Yoga Dance and Music Collective, a Yoga-Dance performing arts group in Ithaca NY.