Featured Speakers
Lorelee Isbell serves as the Associate Vice President for Career and Workforce Development at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania. In this leadership position, she drives strategic initiatives that strengthen career readiness, broaden workforce development opportunities, and contribute to regional economic growth by attracting and retaining top talent in South Central Pennsylvania. With her expertise in higher education, Lorelee plays a key role in bridging the gap between education and employment, advancing programs that prepare students for successful careers while fostering partnerships with industry leaders.
Lorelee’s professional journey includes 23 years of service with the Office of the Chancellor for Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education. During this time, she led strategic efforts at higher education centers in Harrisburg and Philadelphia, enhancing access to education and providing premier spaces for business and organizational events. Her work centered on building collaborative relationships across the 14 State System universities to deliver impactful continuing education and workforce development programs.
Beyond her role at Shippensburg, Lorelee actively engages with the community through leadership roles on various committees, including Leadership Harrisburg Area, South Central PA Works, and the University Professional and Continuing Education Association. She also serves on the board of directors for Community Carepoint. Lorelee holds a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from Messiah College and a master’s degree in organizational development and leadership from Shippensburg University.
As senior vice president, work-based learning, Laura Love leads Strada’s work-based learning agenda, which focuses on paid internships and apprenticeships that help students connect their education to their career aspirations. Love’s work emphasizes ways to scale paid, quality work-based learning experiences across the United States and focuses on the research, policies, and practices needed on a national level to achieve systems change.
Before joining Strada in May 2024, Love served as a partner at Grads of Life, an initiative of the national workforce development nonprofit organization Year Up, where she worked to advise large employers on inclusive talent strategies.
Love spent 10 years at Year Up and Grads of Life, its consultancy arm. In 2014, Love helped launch Grads of Life as a national communications campaign with the Ad Council, focused on changing public narratives about young people who are neither enrolled in school nor participating in the labor market. Following the campaign, Love played a key role in leading Grads of Life’s strategic growth and impact, supporting the creation of a consulting practice, and developing a research and thought leadership strategy. Earlier in her tenure at Year Up, Love developed a blueprint for program expansion, overseeing the launch of Year Up’s first employer-based training model in partnership with multinational toy maker Hasbro.
Love also led international expansion projects for global nongovernmental organization Ashoka, based in Singapore. She connected social entrepreneurs with seed funding, built strategic partnerships with business leaders, philanthropic entities, and nongovernmental organizations, and helped secure support to expand the organization’s presence into Malaysia.
Love holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Oxford’s Said Business School and a Bachelor of Arts in international studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She lives in Baltimore with her husband, son, and Bernese mountain dog.
Nichole Torpey-Saboe is Vice President of Research for Strada Education Foundation. She provides leadership and support in designing and producing original research aligned with Strada’s strategic pillars and facilitates collaboration and collective impact across the field to improve equitable pathways to opportunity through postsecondary education and training. Key research projects include the State Opportunity Index, alumni outcomes studies with more than 70 institutions, and Strada’s Public Viewpoint research series to track the impact of the pandemic on education and the workforce. Prior to joining Strada in 2018, she worked as an independent consultant, advising higher education, nonprofits, and local government on research, evaluation, and strategy. She is the author of the book Measuring Education Inequality in Developing Countries (Springer, 2018). Torpey-Saboe holds a doctorate in political science from the University of Colorado Boulder and master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Georgetown University.