Lana Cook, Ph.D. is Director of Communications at the Center for Systems Awareness, where she works to grow community through the Center’s online website, social media, newsletter and other publications.  Lana is a Certified Master Practitioner from Cohort 3 with the Center.

Lana is also the Associate Director of the Systems Awareness Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  Her research explores the use of aesthetics and narrative forms to express emergent sensory, affective and cognitive awarenesses across individual, relational, and collective levels. 

Prior to this work, Lana has worked as a strategist at MIT Open Learning, incubating new initiatives in education, including the Refugee Action Hub (ReACT) and Emerging Talent programs. Lana earned a doctorate in English at Northeastern University, with a focus on contemporary American literature, cinema studies and visual culture, where she was a 2014 Humanities Center Fellow investing different iterations and meanings of virality.  She received her bachelor’s from University of New Hampshire in English and Philosophy.   She is currently writing on a book on the history of the women of the psychedelic sixties.   Her work appears in Configurations (John Hopkins UP), Chacruna, Forced Migration Review (U of Oxford) and other venues.