Natalie Blair is the Senior Director of Data and Digital Innovation and serves as a technical leader in digital teaching and learning at UCI’s Paul Merage School of Business. Natalie balances the competing demands intrinsic to educational innovation and emerging instructional practices while managing and mentoring staff and project teams focused on designing and developing high-quality digital learning experiences. 

Natalie is a dedicated professional with 12+ years of leadership experience in higher education and learning experience design at the University of California, Irvine. She has a diverse background, including the management, collaboration, design, and development of several continuing education, undergraduate, and graduate-level programs with subject disciplines in business administration, project management, instructional design, digital marketing, engineering, computer science, education, and pharmacology. Throughout Natalie’s tenure at UCI, she has demonstrated her commitment to promoting greater access to higher education through the collaboration of reconceptualizing the path by which students learn and finding ways through education to bolster the American Dream. Natalie has impacted the higher education learning design space throughout her career by influencing efforts towards the innovation and reinvention of pedagogically sound, well-rounded, and meaningful digital learning experiences. At the Merage School, Natalie continues to influence the design of high-quality, evidence-based higher education courses that offer increased access, flexibility and that are universally and inclusively designed for all types of learners. She aspires to manage and cultivate opportunities to develop learner environments that curate knowledge and prepare for practical application and synthesis of concepts leading to impactful and transformative learning. 

Natalie holds a Master’s degree in Educational Technology (M.E.T.) from Boise State University and a Bachelor of Arts degree with an emphasis in business and sports management from the University of the Pacific.