Entering Quinnipiac unsure what she wanted to do after college, Gleeson said she struggled at first to try to fit her interests and passions into a single bachelor’s degree program.

“In my first semester, I was seeing throughlines across my passions in a lot of the classes I had taken — anthropology, philosophy, English — and I couldn’t just pick one,” Gleeson said.

Combing through the course catalog with her adviser, Gleeson followed an asterisk to its notation.

“It said, ‘Inquire about an independent major,’ and I said, ‘that’s the one that I want,’” said Gleeson.

Working with faculty, Gleeson designed her independent bachelor's program in international development and Human Rights. The program was based on coursework geared to studying the relationship between people and the systems that have power over them.

“I really got to work with professors to build out my academic journey in a way that felt really good to me. I never took a class I didn’t like,” said Gleeson. “That was true for me at Quinnipiac because my professors were willing to work with me and trusted my vision enough to co-create with me.”

As part of her interests, Gleeson also became actively involved with the Albert Schweitzer Institute at Quinnipiac. Through the institute, in 2010, Gleeson and four other students wrote and delivered a Declaration on Behalf of the World’s Youth at the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in Hiroshima, Japan.

After graduating from Quinnipiac, Gleeson joined Teach for America, working with students in the Hartford, Connecticut school system.

“There is nothing that will teach you more about systems and structures that enable or disable a society and opportunity than being 21 years old in a classroom where I saw 150 students a day,” said Gleeson. “During my time at Quinnipiac, I focused a lot of my education on learning about the world and communities that were outside of the U.S. Here I was, not even 30 miles from where I went to school, being faced with what was happening in our backyard. So I learned the theory in school, but I was then faced very quickly with the urgency around what can be done when there’s an imbalance between the needs of humans and the systems that are meant to support them.”

Gleeson joined the volunteer, two-year program and stayed for five years, teaching history and Spanish.

“During that time, I also was still connected to Quinnipiac, because Professor David Ives, who ran the Albert Schweitzer Institute, had invited me to join his students at a summit, and I said, ‘Only if my students can come,’” Gleeson said.

Ives, who is now executive director emeritus at the Albert Schweitzer Institute, wholeheartedly supported Gleeson’s idea.

“It was basically unheard of to have high school students at these summits, let alone kids from Hartford,” Gleeson said. “I understood my students were facing deep inequities, so their access point to have this type of college experience which Quinnipiac embraced was a growing unlikelihood.”

As a result, Gleeson was named U.S. program director of high school programs, as a permanent secretariat of the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, a post she held through 2016. During her tenure, Gleeson raised more than $50,000 to design experiences for the first delegations of high school students to attend summits in Warsaw, Poland and Cape Town, South Africa.

“We raised all the money and took Hartford kids, together with Quinnipiac students and professors, to two summits of Nobel Peace Laureates. It was one of the most beautiful things to see that full-circle moment, said Gleeson. “It was amazing to see, again, the trust I received from the Quinnipiac community, and to get that opening for me to lead.”

After leaving Teach for America, Gleeson went to work for a year in the office of Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, serving as a public policy analyst specializing in educational and juvenile justice policy. The work led to Gleeson being named senior transformation consultant for Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) a year later.

“I was sitting with the superintendent of DCF, and they were trying to solve for the problem of continuing education for juveniles who had been incarcerated. Speaking of layers of structural problems, 70% of those kids were also a part of the foster care system,” Gleeson said.

Gleeson said high school-aged youth who are released from juvenile detention often do not return to school, due to being faced with constraints such as those created by employment or caring for their family unit, their siblings, or children of their own.

Because these hurdles created a roadblock to their education, a solution was needed, and Gleeson helped to find it.

“Just like at Quinnipiac, I have lot of memories of an open book, and me sitting down with a mentor, scouring through the pages. We found a legislative statute from the 1970’s that gave the superintendent the right to start a school under DCF,” said Gleeson. “It didn’t say anything about the school being brick and mortar, so we went ahead and started the first virtual school in the state of Connecticut to support kids who were getting out of juvenile detention.”

Connecticut’s DCF Virtual Academy program, which Gleeson helped to found, continues to offer the completion of a high school education to newly released juvenile offenders.

In 2017, after two years assisting with system changes at the state level, Gleeson pursued an opportunity to make meaningful change nationally, becoming Teach for America’s director of communications and policy affairs. During her two years of leadership, she also gained valuable lobbying experience.

As a next step on her mission to make an impact, in 2019, Gleeson entered the corporate world in project management and marketing at IBM.

During her four years with IBM, Gleeson rose to become global digital marketing leader of corporate social responsibility, followed by being named Global UX and Design Leader. In 2022, she joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) as strategist and marketing professional in her role as a global marketing leader. She now serves as marketing leader for AWS Cloud Institute.

“The way I would describe my trajectory is that I’ve been on a hunt to figure out what level and layer of the systems have the biggest lever for impact,” said Gleeson. “At IBM, I worked in corporate social responsibility and that’s where I got into product development and marketing. At both at IBM and Amazon, I’ve been at the intersection of when an enterprise has an idea about how they want to impact a certain group, in my case, by providing education, and how do you do that effectively, so people will want to be involved and can benefit?”

Gleeson’s passion for strategy and combing through data and information marries well with a certain dilemma Gleeson often works to solve: inspiring big tech to curate development of meaningful opportunities for people, while also closing the empathy gap.

“A lot of times, my roles at these companies have been to be an intermediary between people and product, and I really like that,” said Gleeson. “I’m a translator, a weaver. I take seemingly disparate things and bring them together so they actually work. There has to be the will, and the know-how, to bring those things together.”

Gleeson’s ambition to assist others has now blossomed into two new businesses she’s building. With the first, ravish.life, Gleeson offers tools, workshops, and self-study for nervous system wellness within community. The second enterprise,  And/Also, is a consulting business Gleeson has launched with a colleague.

“With Ravish, I’m helping people work on supporting their own nervous system, but in community. It’s individual work, but it’s not individualistic, which is something else I learned from my time at Quinnipiac,” said Gleeson.

By disrupting silos within businesses and promoting co-creation, And/Also helps support small and medium-sized businesses and enterprises connect the products they’re building with the people that they’re serving.

“We’re focusing on companies that are trying help humanity or the environment become better,” said Gleeson. “We help to break down the silos that often happen in business. Our approach is that it’s not either-or; it’s and-also. I’m excited, because I love to work with passionate people on very hard problems.”

Gleeson said curiosity is a bit like an aphrodisiac for life.

“At Quinnipiac, curiosity was instilled in me in a way that has sunk into my bones. I just can’t help moving through the world with ambition, finding interesting problems that I want to solve and people I want to work with,” said Gleeson. “I’m allowing curiosity to lead the way. What really matters is what I am most curious about – what problems feel like they light a fire in me to solve. My professors at Quinnipiac are the ones who taught me how to do that.”