Company Info for coloradodems.org | IcebreakerMembers
I'm an experienced HR, People Ops, Culture, and Talent Leader, former social worker, people person, and adventurer. I've put in a lot of elbow grease to build great teams and workplaces over the past several years, and I love being at the forefront of HR. I was the Head of People at Blueboard for 2 awesome years, VP of HR at Kickstarter for ~5 years of amazing growth, and more recently, I’ve enjoyed providing HR and Talent Consulting to a variety of startups and nonprofits. In addition, I've begun offering career coaching to individuals, which includes planning career transitions, managing difficult work situations, and navigating job searches. I’m skilled across all areas of the people function and passionate about building and scaling companies with positive, inspiring missions. I love creating functional people ops infrastructure and systems, supporting employees with empathy, and creating robust, effervescent cultures.
If we can be helpful to one another, please don't hesitate to reach out. You can reach me here or at shanferg.hr@gmail.com. 
I am passionate about climate change mitigation, and I thrive when I am able to use skills like public speaking, writing, teaching, and illustration to communicate scientific knowledge. I believe the ability to effectively communicate the importance and relevance of scientific findings to a specific audience is critical for climate mitigation implementations.
Currently, I am serving as a CivicSpark AmeriCorps fellow with the Sacramento Air Quality Management District, where I am focused on extending their Urban Heat Island Mitigation Project to a hyper-local scale. My work centers around the mobile biometeorological platform MaRTy, a tool developed by researchers at ASU that represents an exciting breakthrough in the study of urban extreme heat. It calculates mean radiant temperature, which is the total heat load that people experience in a hot, dry climate. It's designed for optimal data collection on a neighborhood scale and the data we collect will allow informed and specific extreme heat mitigation recommendations. Our research design is focused on cooling down mobile transportation pathways--where people walk, bike, wait for the bus, etc--to alleviate the burden of excess heat during the summertime.
Because the Sac Metro Air District is just one of very few groups in California to possess this device, the research we conduct will be invaluable not just in the Sacramento regions, but for cities everywhere seeking tangible extreme heat mitigation measures. 
