Welcome, Katrina Carlson!
Join us in welcoming our newest Research Associate and Project Manager, Katrina Carlson, to the ShadowBox Team!
Katrina joined the ShadowBox team at the beginning of June 2026. With a background in education, applied cognitive science, and human factors, Katrina fits right in. Take a look at Katrina’s bio to learn more! Welcome to the ShadowBox team, Katrina!
A note from Katrina:
“My first experience learning about Naturalistic Decision Making was at Michigan Tech, where I took a graduate course on Cognitive Task Analysis with Dr. Beth Veinott, who had once worked for Dr. Gary Klein, one of the founders of the NDM Movement. We used Working Minds by Crandall, Klein, and Hoffman as our text. It was fascinating and different than any other research I had learned about or conducted. One of the most influential papers that I read at the time was by, now, Dr. Laura Militello on the decisions that NICU nurses make when infants are showing signs of sepsis before actual test results confirm the danger. I knew then that studying and training how experts really make decisions in high-stakes, time-pressured and complex situations was something I wanted to do. I actually sent an email at that time to ShadowBox, which was several years ago now, asking if they needed an intern!
Previous to attending Michigan Tech as a graduate student, I was a school administrator for the last 10 years of my career as an educator. I know the power of staff training for high-stakes situations with students. ShadowBox combines all of the necessary parts of learning from experts into training exercises that use real scenarios from the field with decision points and complications, with feedback from experts, but without the hours of sometimes dangerous and often rare experiences. It’s brilliant. It draws from all that we know about optimal learning and combines it with what we now know about expert decision making using tacit knowledge rather than mathematical formulas in complex and time-pressured situations.
I am very excited to join ShadowBox as a researcher and project manager, where we continue to use theory and methods that have stood the test of time to understand practical and consequential decision-making in the real world, including the Recognition Primed Decision Model (RPD) and Data-Frame Theory of Sensemaking. I’m especially excited that we are exploring new areas of work and human-machine teaming as they develop, including the use of AI in human-centered approaches. What continues to fascinate me is people and their work: what makes it meaningful, challenging, and motivating. As an applied cognitive psychologist, I am interested in helping uncover the often-invisible cognitive aspects of work and using that understanding to create better ways to support understanding, learning, and decision making. The work may evolve, the technology will change, but the fundamental question remains: How can we better understand how people think and make decisions in the real world, and use that understanding to help them succeed? It is a privilege to be exploring that question with such a talented team. “