The institute aims to better connect students around the world in order to “build more peaceful and equitable societies by advancing scholarship, building economies and promoting access to opportunity.” As a member of the research team, Tanner has the job of “rethinking the way they organize and present data” about educational programs across the globe. “My role,” Tanner explains, “is to look at those surveys and think about which other, outside sources can give them context” for the purpose of better understanding the populations her program serves.

Before she became a designer, Tanner was a medical researcher. “Coming from the world of science, with its very standardized approach, and then going to an art school and then learning design — it was kind of scratching the other side of my brain,” she says. “But I was surprised by how much of it was the same.” Tanner’s first experience in medical research made her initially “hesitant to include any of my own interpretation in what I created.” Over time, though, she gained confidence and learned to use her work as a way to tell a story about data instead of merely collecting facts. For her final project, Tanner gathered data from her former discipline, focusing on species bias in conservation research. Curious about whether scientists were favoring certain species in their scholarship, she assembled a data set from papers published in the prestigious journal Nature on every species from one order. “And what I saw was that a handful of species were getting almost all of the attention.”

Tanner feels that Parsons prepared her well for her new job at the Institute of International Education. “What the institute is hoping to have with this role is someone who can take a very different approach to answering a research question,” she explains. “Parsons helped me rethink the way I organize and present data.”