About Me

It’s always frustrated me that education—particularly science education—is incredibly painful and disengaging for so many learners. I’m a fervent believer that new technologies and digital content, meticulously built and thoughtfully deployed, are our best bets for creating accessible educational experiences that scale. I’m particularly passionate about bringing the highest quality education to students outside of the selective “ivory towers." In academia, that’s about considering the often-forgotten needs of, say, a struggling single dad returning to community college part-time to start a nursing degree. And in the business world, it’s about seeing how brilliant workforce education, instead of mind-numbing training, can change careers and industries.

 

My projects are varied, but all focus on teaching and technology in one way or another. My YouTube channel, where I’ve created lessons on Chemistry and Biology, helps hundreds of thousands of students every day with their courses. With Google and XVIVO Scientific Animation, I created a virtual reality experience that takes learners inside a human cell. And I am the video author for "Interactive General Chemistry," a new digital chemistry textbook published by Macmillan Learning: the digital book takes the newest ways that students learn and brings them to an older, more traditional medium.

 

I served as Teaching and Learning Lead at Socratic, an innovative education technology start-up, where I helped to design an artificial-intelligence tutoring system. Most recently, as the Executive Director of Innovation at Virtuosi VR, I create rich VR learning experience that teach the skills and theory needed to manufacture advanced cell and gene therapies in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology spaces. 

 

I spend a lot of time speaking about the need to rethink and disrupt traditional approaches to education so that we can meet the needs of more students.

 

And for someone who really wants to see academia get its act together, I also love it and respect it, and it’s been a big part of my life. I grew up in a small college town with a professor father, and I have a bachelor’s degree in Biology from Brown University, and a doctorate in Microbiology from MIT.