CC was like a refuge for Danielle Krettek Cobb ’00 as a student.

But not every student has that experience or feeling, especially now.

Krettek Cobb hopes to help the college by parlaying her skills and experience “building heart — care and love — into technology.”

“Your ability to deeply learn and integrate is based on your emotional resilience and capacity. We need to acknowledge all the visible and invisible factors of being that play into our mental health and inherent sense of wholeness: at any given moment parts of us can feel like they’re vast, shining, rooted, and connected or diminished, lacking, lost, and outside of ourselves. How can you reorient and resource yourself to meet the moment, to shore up your beliefs, behaviors, inner life, and outer connection to step into more resilience and strength? We can work to increase peoples’ capacity; our challenges can become our resources,” she says.

She is the founder of Google’s Empathy Lab and will serve on CC’s Mental Health Task Force. Her lab’s mission is to inform Google’s most advanced technologies with empathy, resilience, and wisdom of the heart. She does this through contemplative practices and “design feeling” methods, the next iteration of “design thinking.”