Elisabeth Gunningham currently serves as Dr King Holmes’ Executive Assistant in the Department of Global Health. She began her career of support service as an eight-year old, working alongside her siblings to help her blended-culture missionary parents (mother from Yakima, WA, and father from Bristol, UK) run an international boarding school near the small town of Vavoua, in Cote d’Ivoire. Growing up as a Third Culture Kid (TCK), with educational, emotional and familial ties in three continents (born in the Belgian Congo and re-located to Cote d’Ivoire when she was five, with occasional visits to England and the United States throughout her childhood), exposed her to extreme economic and cultural divides, which shaped her sense of social justice and created her deep desire to support meaningful work while engaging personally with those around her. She left Africa at 19, obtained her BA cum laude in European Studies at Seattle Pacific University, and settled in Seattle. Her somewhat meandering career path has included a position as a Lab Tech B; training and working as a Licensed Massage Practitioner, and eighteen years in the biotech industry in a variety of roles from grants and contracts, to administrative support for human resources, senior scientists, executive management; and more. Other favorite experiences include being a program assistant for an Seattle Pacific University European Quarter Abroad; teaching cake decorating; and acting as “den mother” for approximately 250 college students working at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004. Working in the Department of Global Health has felt like a homecoming, and fulfills her core values of social justice and personal engagement in meaningful relationships and work, and Elisabeth is very happy to be supporting the mission and future of the department as part of this extraordinary team of people.