Ms. Hamlen-Ridgely currently serves as a Communication Assistant Professor at Marine Corps University (MCU) in Quantico, Virginia. She joined the university in 2007 as a founding member of the Leadership Communication Skills Center and was instrumental in establishing the center’s mission, vision, operating procedures, and pedagogical practices. Ms. Hamlen-Ridgely has experience teaching military students of various ranks, to include NCOs completing the Senior Enlisted Course and officers attending CSC, SAW, and MCWAR programs. She assists students to improve their written and oral communication skills through one-on-one consultations, as well as courses and workshops that focus on rhetorical strategies, grammar, thesis development, research methods, the writing process, and oral presentation skills. She assists faculty to provide usable feedback on written work and to design assignments that encourage critical and creative thinking. In addition to her teaching and mentoring, Ms. Hamlen-Ridgely is the lead editor of the MCU Communications Style Guide, the standard writing guide for MCU degree-granting schools. She also serves as the executive chair of the WCCG, a nation-wide consortium of writing center professionals from graduate-level PME schools.  

Ms. Hamlen-Ridgely holds an M.Ed in Adult Education from the Pennsylvania State University and a BA in English from the University of Mary Washington. Her research interests include best practices in teaching and learning that facilitate creative decision making, as well as close reading and information literacy practices that help learners to recognize misinformation and disinformation. She is also the author the chapter “A Failure to Demystify the Research Process,” which appeared in the 2022 edited volume titled Developing Military Learners’ Communication Skills Using the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.