Expertise matters. So does experience.
Dr. Jennifer Ulie is a nationally recognized social, emotional, and mental health expert, systems transformation specialist, and award-winning speaker whose work spans education, leadership, policy, organizational change, and the realities people experience inside complex systems.
More than two decades inside the work, not just studying it.
Jennifer has spent more than two decades working with thousands of leaders, educators, policymakers, nonprofits, healthcare professionals, and justice systems to change how organizations understand and support social, emotional, and mental health.
Her career has moved across classrooms, higher education, nonprofit leadership, school board governance, national collaboration, research, professional learning, and systems change. Across those roles, one question has remained remarkably consistent: what do people actually need to do this work well?
Her leadership has included work as a teacher, professor, nonprofit founder and executive director, elected school board leader, and national collaborator with teams connected to federal agencies and national organizations.
What makes Jennifer’s work distinctive is not simply the range of roles she has held. It is the way she brings research, practice, leadership experience, and lived experience into the same conversation. Mensana grew from that synthesis.
Practice. Leadership. Research. Lived experience.
Jennifer’s perspective comes from working in very different seats inside people-serving systems. That breadth is part of why Mensana approaches complex challenges by connecting what is often considered separately.
Education + School Mental Health
Decades of experience as an educator, professor, trainer, researcher, and leader in school mental health and professional learning.
Executive + Governance Leadership
Nonprofit founder and executive director, elected school board leader, and experienced organizational strategist.
National Collaboration + Research
National advisory, policy, research, media, and collaboration across mental health, education, youth wellbeing, and systems change.
Lived Experience
Personal and family experience that keeps the work grounded in what policies, programs, and systems actually feel like to the people living inside them.
Facing Suicide
Dr. Ulie was featured as an expert in PBS’s Facing Suicide, a national documentary exploring suicide, prevention, lived experience, and what becomes possible when we understand the problem more deeply.
Professional expertise and lived experience are not competing ways of knowing. Both can reveal parts of the picture that the other cannot see alone.
Systems are experienced by real people.
What makes her stand out is not just her résumé. Jennifer brings lived experience with significant childhood trauma, suicidality, parenting, and navigating complex systems alongside her professional and academic expertise.
That perspective shapes a core Mensana belief: people experiencing a system hold information that system cannot afford to lose. Better systems begin when expertise, data, lived experience, relationships, and context are allowed to inform one another.
Work grounded in both evidence and experience.
Change how we see it. Change what’s possible.
Explore Jennifer’s speaking work or connect with Mensana about professional learning, tools, leadership, and systems-change support.
Company
About
Blog
Work With Us
Contact
(323) 917-1650
info@mymensana.com
Mymensana 2026