Trity Pourbahrami is a boundary spanner with over 15 years of international experience in strategic communications, science communication, and employee engagement encompassing the higher education, government, philanthropic, and corporate sectors. She is a strategic leader with a proven track record of effectively engaging diverse groups and supporting organizations as well as their stakeholders with transformational efforts. These efforts include implementing principles of equity and inclusion to bring about more diversity in science and engineering. She is passionate about building trust and using co-production of knowledge approaches to overcome barriers and solve problems. As a seasoned facilitator and mediator, she has extensive experience handling complex and sensitive situations involving multiple constituencies and requiring diplomacy.
Currently she leads communications for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s science program which advances the understanding of emerging scientific fields through developing new technologies, supporting imaginative research scientists, and creating new collaborations at the frontiers of traditional scientific disciplines. Before joining the foundation, she was director of communications at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), a world-renowned science and engineering institute. In this role she led the communications office of Caltech’s largest academic division and collaborated on communications efforts across all six Caltech divisions and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She also designed and taught an innovative graduate course in effective science and engineering communication which led to the establishment of the first science and engineering communications academic program at Caltech. In addition, she was the editor of the award-winning publication ENGenious.
Trity earned her Bachelor of Science degrees in physics and physiology from the University of British Columbia and her master’s degree in social welfare and public administration from the University of Hawai’i. She serves on a number of leadership bodies locally, nationally and internationally to increase diversity, equity, justice, and inclusion in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields.