Danna Bailey '89

From answering questions about caller ID to helping shape Chattanooga's quantum future, Danna Bailey '89 has built a career around making the complicated understandable.

If you ask Danna Bailey '89 to explain quantum technology, she'll warn you first: "You almost have to take your common sense and put it in the closet."

Then she'll do exactly what she's spent her career doing—translate something complex into language anyone can understand.

Today, Danna serves as Strategic Planning and Communications for Chattanooga Quantum Collaborative, where she helps connect educators, researchers, businesses, and community leaders as Chattanooga positions itself at the forefront of emerging quantum technologies. It's a role she describes as "connective tissue."

"We're not the most important people in the room," she said. "But we're keeping all the important people connected to what each other are doing so that we can amplify, make better, and go faster as a community."

It's fitting work for someone who has spent decades helping people understand change.

Over the course of her career, Danna has worked in industries as varied as trucking, utilities, and now quantum technology. While the subjects have changed, her mission has not.

"I think what's connected all of those experiences is my audience," she said. "My job is to explain things as best I can in simple terms so that the rest of the world can start to understand the possibilities that are in front of us."

That skill first emerged while she was a college student working at a call center in the early 1990s. At the time, technologies we now take for granted—voicemail and caller ID—were brand new.

"People would call and ask, 'So when someone leaves me a message, do I go outside to my mailbox to pick it up?'" she laughed. "That's when I realized I was good at simplifying things."

Long before she was explaining quantum networks, though, Danna was a seventh-grader walking onto the GPS campus for the first time. While she admits she wasn't a very good student, that didn't impact her experience.

"I loved GPS," she said. "I loved it from beginning to end. I didn't want to leave."

When she did leave, her takeaways were valuable.

"I feel like I walked out of GPS with confidence and curiosity, which are probably the most important things you need as a grown-up."

Danna believes the all-girls environment played an important role in building that confidence.

"You're not worried about what the cute boy is going to think if you answer the question wrong," she said. "I do think that plays a role."

That confidence and curiosity have carried her through a career defined by innovation and change. Today, she is helping Chattanooga build pathways into one of the world's fastest-growing fields, ensuring that students and workers in the region have opportunities to participate in the future economy.

For Danna, that work is about more than technology.

"It's about economic mobility," she said. "How does Chattanooga continue to be a place where people can find good, family-sustaining, interesting jobs? We think quantum technology is going to be a big piece of the future economy, and we want people in this area to be able to participate in it."

And if she could offer one piece of advice to today's GPS students?

"Stay curious and open," she said. "Never, ever, ever be afraid to ask for help. There's no such thing as one person who can do everything. Real progress and real success comes when you have other people helping you."

For a woman whose career has been built on connecting people, ideas, and possibilities, it's advice she's lived every day.