![Marian Baldonado](https://www.colorado.edu/atlas/sites/default/files/styles/small/public/people/marian_baldano.jpeg?itok=NaY8qXUr)
Marian Baldonado is a Social Impact graduate student in the Creative Technologies and Design program. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, with a focus in cognitive science, from the University of Santa Cruz, California. Her concentration was on designing robots to be useful and accessible, and to enhance human-robot collaboration. After graduation, she attended a bootcamp for user-experience design and worked as a paraeducator, helping elementary through high school students with special needs transition to general education. There she built a makerspace and STEAM pathway program for the middle school department so that middle school special education students could explore and take creative risks when learning science and technology. Marian's experience with HRI, HCI and user experience research, combined with working with specialized demographics, fuels her passion to make nascent technologies accessible to disenfranchised groups.