Find the Coach that's Right for You
Finding the right coach starts with understanding what you're hoping to accomplish.
Every TULI coach has completed TULI's Resilience and Leadership Coaching Certification Program, which includes more than 75 hours of training led by an International Coaching Federation (ICF) Master Coach. All coaches uphold the ICF Code of Ethics and bring unique professional experiences from across Tulane University.
There is no single "best" coach. Each coach brings different strengths, experiences, and perspectives. Explore the coaching specialties below, then browse our coach profiles to find someone whose background and approach resonate with you.
How to Choose a Coach
Think about the leadership challenge or professional goal you'd like to focus on.
Review the coaching specialties below to identify coaches whose experience aligns with your needs.
Read the coach profiles and select one or two coaches whose backgrounds resonate with you.
Complete the Coaching Request Form. If you're unsure which coach is the best fit, the Coaching Program Coordinator can help match you with a coach.
Coaching Specialties
Every TULI coach brings a unique combination of professional experience, leadership expertise, and coaching strengths. Use the coaching specialties below as a starting point to identify coaches whose backgrounds align with your current goals or challenges. Then, explore each coach's profile to learn more about their experience and coaching philosophy before submitting your coaching request.
| Consider These Coaches... |
|---|---|
Career transitions and professional clarity |
Nicole Taffaro Bush - Rob Hailey - Jenna Villarrubia - Jennifer Calzada - Dwan Adams - Beth Nazar - Shannon Aicklen - Myriam Huet |
Navigating complex institutions and organizational change |
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Welcoming Community in the workplace |
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High-takes conflict, difficult conversations, and trust |
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Imposter syndrome, self-confidence, and leadership identity |
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Building influence without authority |
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Strengths-based development |
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Team dynamics and organizational design |
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Intercultural leadership and cross-cultural effectiveness |
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Executive presence and senior leadership development |
Beth Wilson - Annie Gibson - Kim Fleming - Bill Hudlow - Rob Hailey - Myriam Huet |
Human Resources and people strategy |
|
Educational and higher education leadership |
Amanda Hill - Victor Holtcamp - Jeannine Coxen - Rob Hailey - Julie Henriquez Aldana - Myriam Huet |
Building new initiatives, social impact, and entrepreneurship |
Stephanie Barksdale - Amanda Hill - Dwan Adams |
Resilience, sustainability, and preventing burnout |
|
Meet Our Coaches
Each TULI coach brings a unique combination of professional experience, leadership expertise, and coaching strengths. Browse the profiles below to learn more about each coach and find the coach whose background and approach best aligns with your goals. Click any coach's profile to learn more about their experience and coaching philosophy.
Shannon Aiklen
Shannon Aicklen spent 23 years leading teams and managing operations at the Tulane National Biomedical Research Center before the title ever said “coach.” When she works with emerging leaders navigating their first real test of organizational complexity, she is not drawing on theory. She has run those halls, managed those pressures, and sat in the same seats her clients are sitting in now.
Teresa Belt
As a teacher, a coach, an assistant principal, and now a higher education leader. Tess brings a competitive athlete’s framework for turning clear intentions into measurable progress, applied to the specific pressure of mid-career leadership, ideally helping clients know how to move forward when they know what they want but can’t close the gap between intention and action.
Jennifer Calzada
Every major step in my career has been achieved by convincing people in leadership I could achieve things that a paper C.V. did not reflect. Demonstrating transferable experience has always been my super strength, and learning from each transition to become a more confident leader has been my superpower.
Tara Desko
Tara Desko began her career at Louisiana State University as a student worker, spending five years growing into accounting and business roles. She then spent 15 years at Tulane University working her way to Executive Director. She didn’t follow a prescribed path — she figured it out as she went, taking on increasing responsibility across roles, leaders, and systems. That lived experience — not a credential or a theory — is what she brings into every coaching conversation with early-career professionals who wonder whether the climb is worth it.
Dale Hall
Dale works at the intersection of executive strategy and institutional relationships in Tulane's President's Office, translating strategy conversations into stakeholder relationships that actually hold. He brings a systems-oriented lens, understanding how decisions, relationships, and strategy interact inside an institution rather than in isolation.
Victor Holtcamp
Before Victor became a professor and department chair, he worked as a program manager and project director in health care. That background in systems building shows up now in how he coaches faculty and staff through the specific pressures of academic and arts institutions. He brings an outsider's structural eye to a very insider culture.
Kim Fleming
As TULI's Director, Kim brings the same evidence-based approach to coaching that she built over 15 years in HR and organizational development. She blends practical expertise with emotional intelligence, helping clients articulate a vision and then actually move toward it.
Beth Nazar
Before Beth coached anyone through a transition, she lived in Buenos Aires for five years, then spent 12 more years helping international students and scholars navigate life at Tulane. Her Presidential Departmental Excellence Award recognized exactly that work. She brings genuine cross-cultural fluency to every conversation about change.
Beth Wilson
Beth Wilson isn’t coaching about organizational complexity from a distance — she is currently leading a 95-person organization across 32 departments inside the same institution you’re navigating. Before she ever entered a coaching conversation, she spent years in Big 4 accounting and built a career at the intersection of finance, operations, and people leadership. Add a CPA, CIA, and PCC to her credentials and you have something genuinely rare: a coach who understands not just the leadership challenge, but the financial machinery, people operations, and institutional complexity underneath it.
Dwan Adams
Dwan calls herself a cultural systems architect, and the title fits: she designs the structural scaffolding that protects a leader's energy instead of just managing their calendar. Her own path ran through diplomacy, media, and entrepreneurship before Tulane. She specializes in clients whose thinking doesn't move in straight lines.
Stephanie Barksdale
It's easy to get stuck waiting for your boss to weigh in, for everyone to buy in, or for all the details to line up first. Shaped by years advising a diplomat and building new programs from the ground up, Stephanie helps clients trust their own conviction enough to take the first real step, then adjust as they learn what actually happens.
Jeannine Coxen
Jeannine Coxen works at the crossroads of public health, higher education, and leadership development. As a Certified Mental Health First Aid Instructor, she also brings a dimension most leadership coaches never consider: the understanding that a leader's capacity to act is inseparable from their readiness as a person.
Bobbie Garner-Coffie
Long before Bobbie coached leaders through change, her training was in social work, not business or education. That foundation means she listens for root causes, not just symptoms of a stalled transition. She's spent her career helping faculty and staff move through technology shifts and organizational change with that same grounded approach.
Amanda Kruger Hill
Most people who study social innovation have never had to build one. Amanda Kruger Hill designed and launched schools as a teacher and principal years before she stepped into a university classroom to teach the subject. That distinction changes what she asks of the students and educators she works with now: not to imagine change, but to build it.
Bill Hudlow
Bill built 35 years of experience across business operations, financial management, and strategic planning at Tulane. Along the way, he also worked directly with graduate and undergraduate students on career strategy, internships, and job searches. He brings that same people-focused, results-oriented approach to coaching high achievers.
Annie Gibson
Annie Gibson has spent more than two decades directing global education across 60 countries. The leadership challenges her clients face are never just organizational: they are human, cultural, and often unspoken. She has led and lived inside that complexity, in three languages, across five continents. That difference shows up in every conversation.
Michael Rodriquez
Before Tulane, Michael managed HR for a global workforce at CenturyLink and partnered with leadership at Unilever to align HR strategy with business goals. He holds a master's in Social-Organizational Psychology from Columbia. He specializes in leaders who need to translate data on turnover, engagement, and talent into an actual decision.
Julie Henriquez Aldana
For 20 years, Julie has lived as what she calls a dual citizen of higher education, both faculty and administrator at once. She has learned to translate between two worlds that rarely speak the same language. Clients navigating faculty and staff dynamics find in her someone who already speaks both.
Nicole Bush
Nicole has guided professionals through career upheaval caused by everything from natural disasters and governmental policy shifts to personal crises and job search burnout. Before any of that, she learned the importance of genuine, quality service from top leaders in the hospitality industry. Those two experiences together produce something rare: a coach who holds a high bar for every single client interaction and understands, firsthand, what it takes to rebuild when the ground shifts beneath you.
Timothy Craft
Timothy Craft came to coaching through anthropology, community organizing, and the operational infrastructure of a research institute. Tim works especially well with clients navigating both complex institutions and complex identities — including queer, trans, and neurodiverse professionals who need a practice genuinely built for them. When clients describe trying to hold onto their values while working within systems that weren't designed with them in mind, Tim knows exactly what that tension feels like from the inside.
Rob Hailey
For more than thirty years, Rob Hailey helped build Tulane from the inside out, leading operations through Hurricane Katrina, launching international programs across four countries, and guiding students and staff toward careers they never imagined. He coaches from experience. He coaches from a life spent proving that the right connection, at the right moment, can change everything.
LaTesha Hinton
Most coaching conversations focus on where a leader is going. La’ Tesha Hinton’s first question is about the team around them. Trained in public health and forged across hospitality and higher education, she coaches with a systems lens that most leadership practitioners simply don’t carry.
Myriam Huet
Myriam Huet grew up in a working-class Franco-Algerian family in France, and she carries that beginning into every room she walks into now, whether it is a doctoral program in the United States, a leadership seat at Tulane, or a coaching conversation with a client staring down something unfamiliar. She has learned what it takes to step into a system that was not built for you and find your footing anyway. She does her best work in the moment right before someone decides they belong, not after.
Del Kirkpatrick Murray
Del Kirkpatrick Murray coaches leaders to get things done through influence, not authority. She has learned that in large, decentralized institutions, the real work happens across boundaries: building partnerships, navigating competing priorities, and shifting from reacting to responding with clarity. She has done that work herself. That is what she brings to every coaching conversation.
Wendy Firven Smith
Wendy Firven Smith facilitates conversations most people avoid, including dialogue between civilians and law enforcement in communities where trust has fractured. That experience is part of her method. She coaches leaders to face the conversations they have been avoiding and act at the moment most people go quiet.
Jenna Zeringue-Villarubia
As a Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach, Jenna doesn't start by asking what's wrong. She starts with what a client is already good at, then builds from there. Her own HR background at Tulane since 2018 gives her a practical read on career progression and organizational dynamics most strengths coaches don't carry.
Choosing a coach is an important decision, and it's okay if you're not sure where to begin. Stephanie Barksdale, TULI's Coaching Program Coordinator, can help you identify the coach whose experience and approach best align with your goals.
