Maggie Schoonover

Maggie Schoonover is the Director of Sustainable Innovation and an Assistant Educator in the College of Innovation and Design at Wichita State University. Her responsibilities include building and teaching curriculum in several areas including, Agile product management, software development for innovation teams, and applying innovation strategies to challenges in sustainability. Ms. Schoonover also invests time in creating new industry partnerships and applied learning opportunities for the College of Innovation and Design, and mentoring multi-disciplinary student teams on industry-sponsored innovation and technology challenges.

 

One of Maggie's primary achievements since joining Wichita State includes the advancement of two student teams representing Wichita State in the 2021 and 2022 NASA SUITS Design Challenge. Team proposals include development of a navigation and science sampling system for astronauts using augmented reality (AR) technology on a head-mounted display. The 2021 SELENE team was the first from Wichita State to compete in any NASA student challenge. The 2022 HarveStars Team advanced to test their designs on-site at Johnson Space Center. Maggie currently serves as faculty advisor for the CosmoShox student research experience, where interdisciplinary student teams research and develop XR technologies for extraplanetary exploration. 

 

In addition to her university appointment, Ms. Schoonover is a licensed Professional Scrum Trainer through Scrum.org and co-owns and manages an Agile consulting and training business with her husband.

 

Prior to joining Wichita State in 2020, Ms. Schoonover served as Instrumentation Manager and Programming Support for MesoWest at the University of Utah. She then took on a variety of software development and project management positions in both scaling businesses and start-ups, eventually growing into leadership roles within technology-focused innovation teams. Ms. Schoonover earned a B.S. in Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma in 2010 and in 2011 received her M.Sc. in Environmental Management from the University of Reading, U.K.