Jeff Scheur
After teaching high school English for 8 years and grading 15,000 papers, Jeff created NoRedInk to help his students improve their writing skills. A National Board Certified Teacher, former debate director, and speaker on education innovation, he is intent on improving the feedback loop in classrooms and empowering students to become skilled, creative, and confident writers. He holds an MA in Education from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a BA from Oberlin College.
Emile Bjerkholt
Emile works on strategic planning, keeps NoRedInk's leadership team focused and aligned, and tackles cross-functional special projects. Prior to NoRedInk, Emile was a principal at Kingfish Group and previously worked as a strategy consultant at Kaiser Associates. Emile holds a BA from Brown University and was a founding member of his high school's Etymology Club.
Mela Drakatos
Coming soon!
Rebecca Sanchez
Rebecca oversees Product, Design, Growth, and Curriculum at NoRedInk. She has spent the past 16 years building products that help millions of students become better readers, writers, and communicators. Before joining NoRedInk, Rebecca led development for IXL Learning's Spanish and ELA products. Prior to that, she developed applications and digital media for educational publishers. She holds a BA from Pomona College.
Robin Sykes
Robin is the executive marketing leader at NoRedInk. She has devoted her career to helping students learn essential life skills, first as an elementary school teacher in Nashville, TN, and later as EVP of Global Marketing at EVERFI. Robin earned a BA from Gordon College and an MEd in Instructional Leadership from Lipscomb University. A native New Yorker who has spent most of her adult life in the south, Robin has finally started embracing the contraction “y’all.”
Blake Thomas
Blake draws on nearly two decades of experience in engineering to support the work, growth, and accomplishments of the exceptional engineers, team leads, and managers he has the privilege of working with. Blake studied mathematics at the University of Chicago, which leads Blake's partner to believe he is at least minimally qualified to sum rubrics for her ELA students' assignments. Joke's on her, and in retaliation, he regularly uses the ampersand in direct contravention of the MLA.
Stephanie Wye
Stephanie works with the Curriculum Team to make NoRedInk's content rigorous and engaging. Before joining NoRedInk, she taught middle school English in Madrid and created literacy curriculum and assessments for a charter network in New York City. She holds a BA in Linguistics and Spanish from Georgetown University and an EdM in Language and Literacy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Stephanie is delighted by regional variations in language like "wait in line" versus "wait on line."
Connor Ashenbrucker
Connor grew up in rural California, cutting firewood and hanging with his hilarious family. He holds a BA from Brown and an MEd from Stanford, and he's a trusty tutor with Reading Partners. Before joining NoRedInk, Connor managed The School Fund, a startup crowdfunding site serving students in high-poverty regions of the world. He sometimes sacrifices syntax for the allures of alliteration.
Jon Katz
Jon helps the product team solve the most important needs of our users. Jon has spent 15 years building products. Prior to NoRedInk, he led product teams at Wikipedia that focused on increasing global readership and simplifying the editing experience so that anyone can contribute to Wikipedia. Jon is consistently embarrassed for the English language when he has to explain spelling rules to his children.
Stacey Adams
Stacey works on making NoRedInk more intuitive and delightful to use. In the process, she is also relearning all the grammar rules she used to know when she wrote commentaries for NPR at Youth Radio. Prior to NoRedInk, Stacey designed and developed mobile and Facebook games at Zynga and created virtual gifts and themes on LiveJournal. Stacey sighs every time she opens a fashion resale app and sees the abundance of items containing "sequence," "heals," and/or "razor back."
Ben Dansby
Ben, or "Dansby" as he's known in some circles, helps design the NoRedInk experience, figuring out ways to make the site easier to use, nicer to look at, and more laden with great features for teachers and students. He's worked as a designer in FinTech and as a freelancer across industries from healthcare to robotics. Ben's a pretty good speller but is a firm believer in the mutability of language.
Tillie M. Fowles
Tillie leads NoRedInk’s Product Growth team to grow the number of students and teachers using NoRedInk and help users get the most out of their experience. Tillie previously worked in product growth for social change organizations and companies, finding new and creative ways to engage people to create change. She loves hiking and hanging with dogs, and she will never say no to a dance party. One of her favorite writing challenges is writing a six word story.
Elise Gaasenbeek
Elise collaborates with the growth and product teams to help provide the best possible user experience and ensure teachers know exactly how NoRedInk can support them in the education process. Elise previously worked in a variety of industries where she helped companies explore new ways to communicate, connect, and create value for their prospects and customers. Elise lives in Toronto, Canada, where she enjoys playing sports, dancing, and diving into a great novel. She also enjoys making note of all the differences in how Americans and Canadians pronounce the same words (e.g., missile, finance, etc.) and likes to use excessive "eh's" when it's clear her American colleagues find the word entertaining.
Max Hoffman
Max helps set the roadmap for what new features we will be building to help support teachers and students. He holds a BA in Computer Science from Vassar and a BE in Electrical Engineering from Dartmouth. Deciding that he was more interested in building products than designing circuits, he went directly into product management within the Edtech industry. An avid reader of all things sci-fi and fantasy, he often gets corrected for pronouncing words incorrectly that he learned from books.
Anshuman Girdhar
Ansh ensures that the pain points and needs of students, teachers, and admins are addressed through NoRedInk and its integrations with various LMS. He has a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After a short stint as a software engineer, he discovered that he’d add better value by being the voice of the user. He enjoys creating music, cooking, hiking, and working out during his free time.
Stuart Jackson
Stuart works with brilliant folks from all over NoRedInk to make sure we're designing and building solutions that meet the needs of educators and students. After graduating from BYU, Stuart came to Phoenix, Arizona, as a Teach for America corps member, teaching special education and earning a master's degree from ASU. He taught for four years before transitioning into edtech, where he's been since 2016. Stuart is a big fan of Oxford commas and Oxford collars alike.
Brian Elieson
Brian is excited to help build products for teachers and students. Prior to NoRedInk, Brian co-founded a startup named Glow that helped independent podcasters thrive. Before that, he worked at technology and media companies as a product leader, general manager, and investor. He received a BA in Math and Political Economy at Williams College and an MBA at Wharton. Logic tells him that the period should often go after the quotation mark, even if others say that is “incorrect”.
Eman Mehrez
Eman helps to keep students, teachers and admins focused on what really matters. Working with the integrations teams, she makes sure NoRedInk users have easy access to all the information they need without having to juggle and context-change between different LMS. Prior to NoRedInk, Eman led the integrations initiatives at Unito.io, helping users stay focused, aligned, and efficient. In her free time, Eman enjoys spending time with her dog, reading historical fiction books, and experimenting with vegan recipes.
Ravi Morbia
Ravi is a product designer, working cross-functionally with many teams to improve the student learning experience and to grow the platform's reach. Before joining NoRedInk, he redesigned multiple core parts of dell.com and helped formalize the process of discovery and framing at Dell. He holds a BA in Sociology with a minor in Math from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science.
Natalie Chapman
Natalie works with the Curriculum Team to develop engaging content for students. Before joining NoRedInk, Natalie taught middle school English in Washington, DC, for six years. She holds a BA in Social Studies from Harvard and a MEd in General and Special Education from Lesley University. Natalie giggles when affected by the ineffective use of "affect" and "effect."
Selorm Quist
Sel supports the Curriculum Team’s curricular dreams! In addition to a stint as a foreign policy analyst, she has been a museum educator, a college writing tutor, and an English curriculum designer for schools in East Africa. She holds a BA in Sociology from Rutgers, and she earned her MS in International Affairs at The New School. Sel enjoys dramatic interjections and the art of verbification.
Lauren McGarry
Lauren helps the Curriculum team create delightful educational materials. She studied linguistics at Georgetown University and the University of California, Santa Cruz. In graduate school, Lauren worked as a teaching assistant and helped students deepen their understanding of sound, meaning, and grammar. She then spent several years designing elementary-level ELA content for another education technology site. Lauren is not sure there is any way to get others to care as much as she does about compound words, but she tries anyway.
Sam Cooper
Originally from the UK, Sam taught English in Spain and Germany before becoming a curriculum designer at NoRedInk. Sam holds a BA in German and Linguistics from the University of Oxford and a postgraduate diploma in TESOL. As a linguist, Sam loves spotting increasingly subtle differences between US and UK English.
Dave Borrelli
Dave craves beautiful writing and believes every student can create it. Before joining NoRedInk, Dave taught English at Berkeley High School for eight years and ran a middle-school summer program in Oakland. He earned his BA in English and Italian Literature from Stanford and his EdM in Teaching and Curriculum from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dave loves mixed metaphors, so he spends each day rolling up his sleeves and diving headfirst into curriculum design.
Anna Smith
Anna works with the Curriculum Team to design engaging content for students. Before joining NoRedInk, she taught at an elementary school in Austin, TX. She has designed curriculum in a variety of non-traditional learning capacities over the years and spent time as an outdoor education facilitator. She holds a BA in Spanish from Hamilton College and an MEd in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Texas at Austin. Anna loves hyperboles more than anything, but it's taken her an eternity to think of a good one to share here.
Allison Hamilton
Before joining the Curriculum team, Allison taught AP Research, AP Literature, and a handful of other high school English courses. She also created ELA curriculum for two charter networks, worked as a freelance writer and editor, and spent two years in Prague teaching English as a foreign language. Allison earned her BA in English Literature and Religious Studies from Rockhurst University in Kansas City and her Master’s in Secondary English Education from Regis University in Denver. Though she currently lives in Brooklyn, she never misses an opportunity to use a folksy, midwestern aphorism like “you can’t get blood from a turnip” or “better not look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Chris Elisondo
Chris works on the Curriculum team, helping write anything and everything that makes a student excited to write back. Chris is an author at heart—he recently completed a 98,000-word Young Adult novel. Since graduating from UC Berkeley, he's worked as an SAT and AP English tutor and written curriculum that helps international students with college-level writing. He's also been living the #vanlife on and off over the past couple of years and is eager to talk about his travels, baseball, and your fondest memories of marching band.
Katina Vradelis
Katina helps the Curriculum team work their curriculum magic! Before NoRedInk, she spent several years at another edtech company; before that, she studied linguistics at the University of Chicago and worked with a delightful bunch of gifted teens. She loves especially apt eggcorns (preying mantis) and rebracketings (but that's a whole nother story).
Sean Cannon
Sean leads the customer support team as they support NoRedInk’s teachers, students, and parents. Before joining NoRedInk, Sean spent four years leading customer support teams at Illuminate Education. Sean loves spending time with his wife and teenage daughters, reading, hiking, gaming, and telling dad jokes. He is quick to remind everyone that they care at least a little bit when they say “I could care less” instead of “I couldn't care less.”
Eris Grant
A lover of language and culture, Eris works with the Support team assisting NoRedInk's teachers, students, and parents. Prior to joining NoRedInk, Eris worked in support for a financial tech company. When she's not working, you can find her chasing her three dogs around the dog park, hiking, or crafting. Eris enjoys sneaking Japanese words into English and explaining the grammatical differences between the two.
Brittany Delos Reyes
Hailing from the Pacific Northwest, Brittany is a creative, critical thinker who never leaves the house without a healthy dose of curiosity in hand. With a passion for software and communication, Brittany is a part of the Customer Support team, assisting NoRedInk’s teachers, students, and parents. Before joining NoRedInk, Brittany worked in escalations and operations support for various financial tech companies. When she’s not working, Brittany enjoys gaming, attending art classes, and talking about her geriatric cat.
Carrie Rodusky
Carrie enjoyed 23 years in the classroom, mostly as an ELA teacher in the middle grades. She first joined NoRedInk as a part-time virtual trainer, and she really fell in love with supporting and helping teachers and admins. She is excited to now be on the Customer Success team, where she can continue to make an impact in the future of education. Carrie is an enthusiastic reader and lover of writing, but as her former students will tell you, don't ever ask her to spell "onomatopoeia." Phew! That was hard.
Dawn Glass
Dawn supports educators in successfully using NoRedInk. Before joining NoRedInk, Dawn was an elementary school teacher. Writing was always her favorite subject to teach, even though she also thinks it's the hardest subject to teach! While teaching, Dawn led reading and writing technology initiatives at her local school. This sparked her interest in learning about how beneficial edtech programs can be for students, especially special education students. Later, Dawn worked for an edtech company helping educators implement new technology. Dawn enjoys it when students ask for advice, so that she can advise them on commonly misused words like "advise" and "advice."
Bob Green
Bob is responsible for the integration of NoRedInk into other platforms. Prior to joining NoRedInk, Bob held various roles in the edtech world and was most recently a data analyst at Illuminate Education. When he's not working in the world of integrations, Bob enjoys roller coasters, steam engines, and attempting to play hockey. Bob's wife is a 7th grade math teacher, and together they have three cats and two dogs. Bob is quick with a reference to movie or television show for almost any situation, much to the annoyance of his wife.
Alec Munro
As a big believer in the empowering value of technology, Alec has spent over 20 years learning to build systems that deliver great experiences. These days, he's convinced that looking after the people using those systems has to be the starting point for any such effort. He is frequently vexed by how many homophones and homographs "right" has.
Alexander Roy
Alexander writes and edits content and performs technical quality assurance for the site. He has a BA from Wesleyan, where he won awards in creative writing and taught chess to elementary schoolers. The best typo he has ever seen is "hot hair balloon," and he’ll ruthlessly insert a "had" if he catches you using simple past instead of past perfect.
Kristine Horn
A tech-savvy lover of systems and games, Kristine has a BA in Spanish and Graphic Design and a certificate in Instructional Design and Technology. Prior to joining NoRedInk, Kristine worked in tech support and institutional research & assessment at an undergraduate college. Before stepping into her current role, Kristine led NoRedInk’s customer support team and worked on the QA team, giving her a deep understanding of both the inner workings of the product and the end user experience. Kristine is endlessly amused that syntactically ambiguous sentences like "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Derek Blankenship
Derek builds automations to ensure consistent quality for our students and teachers. Before NoRedInk, Derek worked in finance, healthcare, and education. He also studied English, Mandarin, and computer science at Whittier College. In his free time, Derek likes to read nonfiction books, play city-building video games, grow food, and cook brownies. Derek is caught in a never-ending battle against acronyms, also known as NEBAA.
Tim Ruble
As a QA analyst, Tim's job is to make sure bugs and issues are getting resolved, but also to check that new features are being implemented without causing other problems. Before NoRedInk Tim worked as a QA engineer at a local company, where he was able to develop his skills but was also in charge of setting up and building out automation testing. Outside of work, Tim enjoys hanging out with his animals, playing games with his friends, and improving his body and mind. He can't help but admire truly terrible dad jokes (specifically puns).
Mike Steder
When he's not herding cats, turning wooden bowls, or painting miniatures, Mike works on scaling NoRedInk to reach more students and teachers via data analysis and experimentation. With over 20 years in software development, working across multiple industries such as climate research, crowdsourced design, electronic payment, and music rhythm games, he's excited to help teachers and students with NoRedInk. Long long ago, Mike was a member of his high school beat poetry team.
Anita Nuthi
Anita is an engineering manager and team lead for one of our feature teams. Prior to joining NoRedInk, she worked in various industries including process control, telecommunications, broadband over power lines, and event management. Anita is working on breaking her habit of writing extra long sentences joined with lots of commas, semicolons, and colons.
Faraaz Ismail
Faraaz focuses on team execution and individual growth for a couple of engineering teams. Previously, he worked in the health insurance, climate & logistics, and email startup spaces. Outside of work, he spoils his cat and dabbles in a variety of activities: improv, crafting, board games, and many more! He is fascinated by how people remember the large number of special rules in the English language.
Collin Doering
Collin is an engineering manager and team lead who has a passion for working on projects and at companies that align with "social good". He currently works with multiple teams. Prior to joining at NoRedInk, Collin worked in the computer security and healthcare industries. He is also a long-time, avid computing hobbyist with interests spanning infrastructure, hardware, security, Free Software, functional programming and package management (Guix/Nix) and, in the very distant past, the Java ecosystem. In his spare time, he likes to spend time with his family, including two young sons, as well as go outside for various activities, including hiking, biking, snowboarding, and boating.
Kristen Riley
Kristen is an engineering manager for the growth and marketing team. Prior to NoRedInk, she led a product team delivering award-winning identity governance software. She has worn a number of hats, from designer and user experience lead to program manager, product manager, and scaled agile expert. After many years of rephrasing ambiguous English terms for translation teams, she is still impressed by how many ways short phrases like "review details" can be interpreted. When not working, Kristen can be found outdoors, on the water or in the mountains and woods.
Jinnah Ali-Clarke
Jinnah is a Toronto-located engineer with a background in mathematics and physics and a deep-seated love for functional programming. He eats functors and monad transformers for breakfast, but don't let that fool you—he still can't multiply 3-digit numbers in his head. At NoRedInk, he works to help other engineers do their thing as effortlessly as possible, as well as making sure that the servers are well fed and groomed. In his spare time he enjoys tinkering with new technologies and making fruit preserves.
Antoine Dauguet
Antoine is a self-taught software engineer with a strong attraction to static typing. This path that led him to functional programming, which aligns perfectly with his quest to give more importance to sleep. Having learned a bit of Thai and Lebanese Arabic, he is fascinated by how languages can appear entirely different, yet have unexpected similarities. Antoine lives in France with his family. When he is not working, he is probably spending time with his wife and kids, hiking and enjoying nature around his beautiful village, or playing board games.
Ilias Van Peer
Ilias has been an Elm aficionado for years. Spiralling down to the extreme end of backend development, he now tries to keep our servers happy. Ilias often finds himself flabbergasted by the etymology of common and uncommon words.
Mariano Coca
Mariano has over 15 years of history working in the computer software industry, working on open-source humanitarian and public health software projects before joining NoRedInk. Mariano, who lives in Buenos Aires, loves open spaces, waterskiing, and playing the piano. He graduated as an electro-mechanic technician and software engineer and loves to know how things work. He enjoys designing solutions to all sorts of problems. Known to many colleagues for his broad interests and knowledge, Mariano is currently learning how to build by doing. He's the chief architect and general contractor for the house he's designing and building for his family.
Mfon Eti-mfon
Mfon loves building things and explaining how they work to people. He's committed to transferring the skills and knowledge from his problem solving journey to his local community so that the people who look up to him can grow to have more and better opportunities than he's had. In his spare time, he's either building solutions with friends from his local LGBTQ+ community or exploring how to teach physics to his nephews and nieces using the game of soccer.
Micah Hahn
Micah is the only member of his family that did not become a teacher; he simply loves programming too much. So, as a happy compromise, he writes software to help teachers foster students’ writing skills at NoRedInk. Micah is passionate about functional programming and enjoys ambiguous grammar in English, but most definitely not in programming languages. Micah and his wife reside in beautiful Astoria, Queens.
Tessa Kelly
Tessa loves solving problems and addressing new challenges in code. Before joining NoRedInk’s engineering team, Tessa spent her time thinking about curricula, learning, and engagement in the context of teaching web development. She holds a BA in Mathematics from New York University, where she also minored in History and in Middle Eastern Studies. Tessa is a passionate advocate for the Oxford comma.
Juliano Solanho
Juliano lives in Brazil and loves cooking singing cats and the importance of commas. Their work is making sure our servers are happy as NoRedInk grows. They're a Recurse Center alum who loves new approaches to education.
Brian Hicks
Brian wants to make good software that helps people. He often finds himself thinking about the difference between countable and uncountable nouns.
Charlie Hanley
Charlie helps build the machinery that powers NoRedInk. A functional programming enthusiast, he strives to write code that is simple, readable, and reliably correct. He previously worked in the domains of supply chain analysis and policy research.
Casey Webb
Casey builds levers and pulls them to see what happens. Prior to NoRedInk, he built learning and compliance management software for the legal industry and contributed to the KnockoutJS community. When not at work, he can be found in the garden with his dogs or the local aquarium shop. He's fascinated by jargon as a concept and the way niche communities have their own vocabularies.
Lindsay Wardell
Lindsay is a fan of both programming and natural languages, and she loves sharing that knowledge with everyone around her. During her time at This Dot Labs, she worked with the team from the Wikimedia foundation on Abstract Wikipedia to help bridge the knowledge gap for less supported languages. She also loves talking with people about their journeys and participates in a number of programming-related podcasts. Lindsay has a BS in Software Development from Western Governors University.
Juan Edi
Juan worked on open source humanitarian and public health software projects before joining NoRedInk. He was also a TA at Concurrency and Programming Paradigms classes in Buenos Aires and loves helping teachers and students for a living. Although usually an even-tempered fellow, he's quite fond of quotation marks and dies a little inside when people use them for emphasis.
Caique Figueiredo
Caique is a tooling and infrastructure engineer. He was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, and he is deeply proud of his heritage as a nordestino. Caique loves the relationship between natural language, programming languages, and mathematics. This frequently makes him think about how language may have an intrinsic power that surpasses everything we've built with logic and math. When he's not working, Caique can never get enough of beaches, surfing and karaoke!
Brian Carroll
Brian lives in Ireland, and he's been working in technology for over 20 years. These days, he helps to make sure our site is able to welcome more and more students while we continue making it better and better. Some day, he hopes to be able to spell the word "Quetzalcoatlus" correctly without looking it up.
Mandla Moyo
Mandla is an engineer who's passionate about making things people love to use. Having worked in the past with trains, airports, and even robots, he’s enjoying the opportunity to now help students learn and grow!
Nuno Ferreira
Nuno comes from Portugal, met his Serbian wife in England, and lives in Slovenia. He's spent the last few years learning and enjoying functional programming. Outside of work hours, he's passionate about everything DIY, sports and music. He loves cacti, octopuses and correct pluralization.
Arthur Jordão
Arthur was born and raised in Osasco, Brazil. He is a huge fan of hot dogs, and thinks that Osasco has the best hot dog in the world. He loves to work out, run, and play a lot of chess. He really likes functional programming languages and has already worked a lot with Clojure (and some parentheses). Now, he is excited to learn a lot of Elm and Haskell.
Juan Wajnerman
Juan (aka Waj) has spent more than 20 years telling computers what to do. He enjoys solving problems and performance issues, bringing software ideas to life, and working on the Crystal programming language. He loves traveling, especially on airplanes. Maybe one day, he will learn to play the piano.
Brian Cardiff
Before joining NoRedInk, Brian worked on maintaining the Crystal programming language and on open source humanitarian and public health software projects. He was also a TA in computer science for 10 years. He likes UX, visualizations, formal methods, and knowing how things work. He can hardly work with swing, jazz and blues music on; he would rather dance to it.
Edson Rios
Edson is an IT worker whose primary job is to prepare data for analytical or operational use cases. He loves working with data, detecting patterns, and finding interesting things. He likes numbers and talking about probability and sees divinity as probability playing on our side. He studied physics and was headed towards data science, but probability took him into data engineering. At the company offsite, he learned that "fun" is not the same as "funny."
Celso Bonutti
Celso likes to write useless software to learn important lessons about how to write useful ones. When not working, he's usually learning how to program with his cat/mentor Canjica. He's very fond of puns, and it makes him a bit sad to remember they almost always get lost in translation.
Ary Borenszweig
Ary cares about simplicity, usability and performance. This led him to create the Crystal programming language, which he currently develops in his free time. He enjoys learning spoken languages. As his first language is Spanish, he had to work hard to learn that there's no implicit subject in English. Is very important that you remember this!
Alex Perkins
Alex loves writing well tested code that we can deploy without a care in the world. Before joining NoRedInk's engineering team writing UI code, he was doing largely the same thing in the world of advertising technology. He'll never get tired of hearing students react favorably to a change we've made at NoRedInk. His favorite thing about the current linguistic moment is that people are willing to make grammar serve them and not the other way around.
Erik Feeley
Erik has the great fortune to be able to embrace functional programming paradigms to build software that improves children's educational outcomes! Before NoRedInk, he most recently worked on a bundle of dotnet services at Domino's, slinging code to make it easier to get pizza to hungry folks faster. Erik also enjoys silly English phrases like "there is no there there."
Charbel Rami
Charbel works with the Accessibility team to ensure everyone can use NoRedInk. He lives in São Paulo, Brazil. Before coming to NoRedInk, he worked on point-of-sale and applicant-tracking systems used by millions of people. He loves open-source software and code that is easy to delete. As a polyglot, he is never sure whether an expression exists in the language he's using or whether he's translating it. He replaces lorem ipsum with pangrams whenever he can.
Jingrong Cheng
Jingrong is a data analyst on the Data and Growth team. Prior to joining NoRedInk, she worked in various channels of the financial industry. As a non-native English speaker, Jingrong has always found it fascinating how various different languages express the same content.
Wes Adams
Wes checks the data for ways to improve NoRedInk's product. Before joining NoRedInk, Wes worked in chemical engineering for a biodiesel plant as well as process engineering and data analysis for a logistics company. He likes to cause confusion by pointing out several of the words that don't follow the rule "i before e except after c," like "their neighbor weighs eight veils." He is happy that spell-check helped him with this biography.
Paige Pollara
Paige works to make sure teachers and administrators get the support they need when using NoRedInk Premium. Before joining NoRedInk, Paige worked as an English teacher in the KIPP charter network; before that, she was a Teach For America corps member in Eastern North Carolina. She holds a BA in English from The University of Arizona. She adores exotic punctuation marks and thinks the interrobang should make a comeback.
Paige Whitlock
Paige works across NoRedInk teams to support the needs of end users—students, teachers, and administrators. Having taught middle and high school ELA in seven states and supervised ELA at the school and district level, Paige understands the difficult job of teaching literacy skills to secondary students. She holds a BA in English from Drake University, an MEd in Educational Administration from the University of Missouri, St. Louis, and an EdD in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies from Virginia Tech. Using inverted syntax, Paige enjoys.
Heather Otto
Heather ensures that teachers can use NoRedInk to deliver high-quality writing instruction to all students. Before joining NoRedInk, Heather worked as an instructional coach and English teacher. She holds a BA in Political Science and History from The Ohio State University and an MA in Special Education from Dominican University. Heather loves to read sci-fi and fantasy, and she is known to drink coffee at all hours of the day. Exclamation marks are her favorite punctuation, but she has to stop herself from using them too often!
Maggie Hagan-Brayton
Maggie supports teachers and schools as they implement NoRedInk. Before joining the NoRedInk team, she taught ELA to English Learners at a high school in Boston, ESL to adults in Boston, and English to adolescents and adults in Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil. She holds a BA in Sociology from The George Washington University. In her free time, she loves traveling, dancing salsa, learning languages, and teaching English on TikTok. She is a big proponent of translanguaging, and she and her partner (a native Spanish speaker) generally converse in Spanglish.
Ray Todd
Ray loves making teachers’ and administrators’ lives easier. Before joining NoRedInk, Ray taught middle and high school English in Philadelphia, Austin, and most recently Richmond, Virginia, where they served as a teacher-leader at the campus and district levels. As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, Ray studied creative writing and ethnomusicology, and they earned their M.S. Ed. in Secondary Education from the same institution. Ray is a sucker for playful language and delights in students’ brave, inventive rule-bending in writing!
Emily Lin
Coming from teaching ELA in urban charter schools, Emily is excited to work with teachers, admins, and districts on implementing NoRedInk in their classrooms to help students everywhere strengthen their voices and opinions. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature, Chinese, and Linguistics from Georgetown University and a M.A.T. from Relay Graduate School of Education. Emily loves thinking about translation and discovering ways to say "let's eat" in different languages.
Liz Jaskolski
Liz is passionate about helping teachers support their students to become stronger, more confident writers. Before joining NoRedInk, Liz taught middle school ELA in the Bay Area. Most recently, Liz piloted and founded the first school-wide Intervention Program for KIPP: Norcal at Excelencia Community Prep. The systems and programs she created are now used throughout the Bay Area. She holds a BA in Psychology from St. John's University in Queens, NY, and a Master's in Education with a focus on literacy from Loyola Marymount University. In her free time, Liz enjoys hiking and camping with her family.
Taylor Brock
Taylor believes that teachers are the closest thing we have to superheroes and loves helping to make their work more impactful by supporting their implementation of NoRedInk Premium. Before joining NoRedInk, Taylor spent five years building collaborative learning communities in San Antonio high schools as a science and English teacher. In her free time, Taylor teaches yoga, fosters dogs, and explores new recipes. Her favorite punctuation mark is the ellipsis for its . . . mysterious flair.
Nick Giammaria
Nick attended Dartmouth College, where he discovered a passion for language during a semester in Italy. After graduating, he continued studying languages while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Haiti and Armenia. Nick holds an MEd from Smith and taught middle school before working at a nonprofit dedicated to mentoring high school students from low-income backgrounds. Nick thinks teaching idioms to his two young children is the cat's pajamas.
Anjali Rajpara
Anjali helps schools and districts fully utilize their NoRedInk subscriptions. Prior to joining the team, she worked as an analyst and account manager at Gartner; before that, she held internships at the Department of Education and the Brookings Institution. Anjali graduated from George Washington University with a BA in International Affairs and always cringes when she hears the incorrect usage of "less" vs. "fewer."
Stephanie Misko
At NoRedInk, Steph is passionate about supporting teachers because they are the most hardworking people on the planet. Before joining NoRedInk, Steph worked as a high school English teacher. She holds a BA in English Literature from Penn State and an MA in Teaching from UNC-Chapel Hill. In her free time, Steph enjoys being outside, playing the piano, and reading anything from literary fiction to Llama Llama Red Pajama (a great work of art, according to her daughter). And she relishes the rebellious feeling of starting a sentence with a coordinating conjunction!
Kerry Offterdinger
Kerry ensures that all of her partner schools and districts utilize their NoRedInk Premium accounts to their fullest potential. Before joining NoRedInk, Kerry was an elementary school teacher and more recently worked to spread her love of blended learning in the southern United States. While she currently resides in Texas with her husband and two young children, she was once an avid beachgoer as she earned her degree in early childhood education at Coastal Carolina University. Kerry would like to remind everybody that a preposition is not the best part of speech to end a sentence with.
Lindley Parris
Lindley comes from a long line of grammar enthusiasts. Prior to joining NoRedInk, she got to work with inspiring administrators and teachers across the country supporting their use of edtech in the classroom, which built on her background as an elementary school teacher in middle Georgia. Educational folks are her people and she is interested in helping Premium users make the most of NoRedInk in their classrooms and schools. Lindley earned a BS in Early Childhood Education – Holistic Child from Mercer University and a MEd in Early Childhood Education from GCSU. She lives in Atlanta, GA with her fiancé and their dog, enjoys running in her free time and always has a song in her head! Lindley would like to remind everyone there is a big difference in asking if they "can" or if they "may" do things.
Diana Gonzalez
Diana ensures that educators have the best experience while using NoRedInk Premium. Student advocacy has always been a passion for Diana. She began her career as a bilingual and dual language teacher in Texas. Prior to NoRedInk, she specialized in implementations for an edtech company that supports English language learners. She loves writing snail mail, puppies, and University of Texas football!
Emily Shank
As a customer success manager, Emily partners closely with schools and districts to make the most of their NoRedInk Premium accounts. After leaving her fourth-grade classroom, Emily initially entered the world of edtech as an instructional and multimedia designer for K-12 online and blended learning programs. Now in a customer-facing role, Emily has a passion for building relationships with districts and schools and providing outstanding service. She brings a genuine enthusiasm and appreciation for grammar and punctuation to NoRedInk. She hopes that enthusiasm is contagious so that people always remember to use commas in the sentence “Emily loves eating, her dog, and her cat.”
Kelly Rickert
Kelly works as a specialist in customer operations. Before this, she taught first and second grade and developed place-based curricular units. She also coached soccer for first and second graders! Kelly has an MEd from the University of Michigan and a BA in Anthropology and Religious Studies from the University of Rochester. When she was in the classroom, she loved seeing phonetically correct creeaytiv spellings and the buzz of a classroom learning about onomatopoeia.
Kevin Busch
Kevin helps schools and districts fully utilize their NoRedInk subscriptions. Prior to joining the team, he worked as a middle school English teacher, instructional leader, and principal in Chicago, Boston, and Dallas. Kevin graduated with a Bachelor of Journalism in Strategic Communication from the University of Missouri-Columbia and earned his MA in Teaching from Dominican University. Kevin lives in Dallas with his wonderful wife and bouncing baby boy who loves dinosaurs—his favorite is the thesaurus.
Ruth Park
Ruth supports schools and districts with the goal of finding value in NoRedInk. She has spent her entire career in education, working as a CSM for various edtech companies and also teaching at the elementary level. When Ruth is not customer successing, you can find her with her pups at the dog park, in the kitchen trying out a new recipe, or laughing with her husband at a comedy show. She hopes to make a positive impact in the world by working with NoRedInk because she knows punctuation saves lives! “Lets eat grandma!”
Chandani Thiessen
As a customer success manager, Chandani helps schools utilize their NoRedInk Premium accounts to their fullest potential. She enjoys creating partnerships with teachers and school districts that help bring valuable literary instruction to students. Prior to joining the team, Chandani worked as an elementary teacher and Starbucks store manager, building meaningful relationships with her students, customers, and local community. Chandani loves to study different languages and cultures. In fact, she took three semesters of Russian courses in college after learning the Cyrillic alphabet and Russian basics on her own! When Chandani’s not at work, she enjoys going on walks, trying new restaurants, and traveling with her family. Chandani loves to let her excitement show, and is often guilty of overusing the exclamation point!!!
Angela Mekosh
Angela leads talent acquisition at NoRedInk, helping all teams to reach their recruiting and staffing goals. Prior to coming to NoRedInk, Angela worked in various capacities in the tech space for companies large and small. Going way, way back, Angela was a social studies and English teacher for middle and high school students, which is another reason NoRedInk's mission is so close to home for her. When not geeking out on all things talent acquisition and HR, you can find Angela reading, cooking new recipes, exploring New York City, and dreaming about living in Barcelona. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband and their dog, Duke Ellington.
Marnée Richardson
Coming soon!
Tina Hatziathanassiou
Coming soon!
Tacy Reading
Tacy is a People Ops Generalist who has been in the edtech industry for over five years. Prior to finding her enthusiasm for People Operations, she spent time in the recruiting, public policy, legal, and education fields. Tacy hold a MA focused in modern U.S. history from Southern Illinois University and a BA in History and Political Science from Gonzaga University. For the record, she is Team Oxford Comma.
MP Bausch
MP does a little bit of everything to keep operations running smoothly. With a passion for helping people, funky glasses, cats, and getting stuff done, she's found a wonderful community at NoRedInk. She gets a little excited when she uses semicolons in sentences; it's the little things in life.
Casey Maas
As a member of the Partnerships team, Casey helps schools and districts level up with NoRedInk Premium. Casey grew up as a renegade in her early years, often pushing the limits of the household rule "no books at the table." She graduated from Scripps College with a BA in Psychology and a deep appreciation for liberal arts education. Casey loves cronuts, skiing, and the Oxford comma.
Jennifer Baroni
Jenn is a field account executive for NoRedInk. Before joining NoRedInk, she was an account executive for a large education technology provider. She spent 13 years as an elementary classroom teacher. She holds a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of New Orleans. Jenn is very excited to join such an amazing company and impact students and teachers with NoRedInk's exclusive product!
Brian Owen
Brian joined our field sales team to bring NoRedInk to the forefront. When Brian isn't helping with his five children, he's actively looking to open doors for others to learn how to best integrate NoRedInk into their day. Brian has a master’s in Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Missouri. He is more than willing to roll his sleeves up to help NoRedInk improve writing across the curriculum and increase district performance on assessments.
Michael Ting
Michael leads the Sales Development team at NoRedInk. Prior to joining the team, he was a Sales Development Team lead for a consumer loyalty startup and a Sales Team Lead for a healthcare IT staffing firm. He graduated with a BS in Political Science from Santa Clara University. Michael moonlights as a Slam poet/Spoken Word Artist and loathes the 3-minute time penalty, as well as hyphen errors.
Despina Matheos
As a field account executive, Despina works with administrators across the Midwest by introducing NoRedInk as a tool to help teach students to think critically, communicate effectively, and harness the power of the written word. Prior to NoRedInk, she was an education partnerships manager for a math supplement for students in grade K-8. She has been in the edtech space for the last ten years.
Mike Stanczak
Mike is a field account executive for the Northwest. Before arriving at NRI, he spent seven years in the K-12 space, selling everything from onsite PD to adaptive learning platforms. His favorite language issue is "cutting the fluff" to find yourself with a concise sentence.
Sheryl Colaur
Sheryl is passionate about helping students learn and has dedicated her career to spreading the word around literacy solutions and quality instruction! Sheryl works with schools and districts as they explore and adopt NoRedInk Premium. A classically trained singer, Sheryl entered the classroom as a K-6 music teacher. Over the last decade, she has worked as an account executive for a large children's literature publisher, a writing technology company, and a professional development and coaching provider focused on Birth-Five programming. Sheryl loves silly children's books and ridiculous songs, and her newest addition to the library is "The Dinky Donkey"!
Holly Koob
Holly helps schools and districts understand the value of upgrading to Premium. She also helps to lead the partnerships team to meet even more needs across the country. Prior to becoming a NoRedInker, she spent 15 years at other ed tech companies, leading teams and helping thousands of students across the country in reading, language and cognitive skill development. In her free time, she loves coaching her daughter's club soccer, playing piano, reading, cheering her son on in mountain biking, playing soccer herself, and spending time with her two giant dogs.
Summer Sinsigalli
Summer works on the Partnerships team, where she strives to develop relationships with districts and schools on their path toward Premium. After graduating with a BA in Sociology from CU Boulder, she took off and traveled through South America. Her journey led her to Nicaragua, where she worked as a program coordinator for a nonprofit. Summer is a sucker for alliteration, especially when it comes to sounds synonymous with her home city, Santa Cruz!
Shaheen Khal
Shaheen works on the Partnerships team and is focused on building relationships with schools and guiding them toward the benefits of NoRedInk Premium. After graduating from Long Beach State with a degree in communication studies and rhetoric, he worked with the U.S. military as a civilian contractor, training thousands of enlisted men and women on how to handle complex social situations. He performs stand-up comedy in his free time, loves being outdoors, and celebrates whenever "effect" and "affect" are used correctly.
Eileen Brumfield
Eileen joined NoRedInk as a school partnerships representative in 2019. Prior to becoming a NoRedInker, she spent five years at Learning A-Z, where she led the New Business Development team for the United States. Her love of motivating people has kept her career focused on servant leadership and the growth of others. She cherishes her free time with her husband of 20 years, her son, and their beloved pittie. She also leads a team at her church, adores architecture, loves designing interior spaces, and revels in the hot AZ sun. #itsadryheat
Rachel McPhail
Rachel works on the Partnerships team, where she helps teachers and students by introducing them to the amazing benefits of NoRedInk Premium. She has been in the edtech industry for roughly ten years, helping students become better readers and writers. Misplaced modifiers are one of her favorite grammatical errors because they can be good comic relief.
Kimberley Vibes
Kim is an inside account executive. Before coming to NoRedInk, she taught ELA for almost five years. Kim was born and raised in France and moved to the US at 16. She gets a huge kick out of translating/explaining French or English idioms to people. When she's not at work, you can find Kim running around Central Park or to the nearest bakery for something sweet!
Pete Brunetta
Pete works as a member of the Partnerships team, where he focuses on developing relationships and interest in NoRedInk's premium program. Prior to working for NoRedInk, he taught middle school ELA for five years and ESL in Spain for a year. In Castilian Spanish, a group of people is addressed as "vosotros"; therefore, Pete is a strong believer in the use of "y'all" in the English language.
Marney Whitney
Marney contributes to our Partnerships team. She has a passion for childhood development, health and travel. Prior to joining NRI, Marney lead a local children's yoga business called YogaJoy. Previously, Marney handled account management duties for a national advertising agency based in Durham, NC. Marney has also spent time living in San Francisco, where she earned her master's in speech therapy and worked for several startups. Marney has always had a passion for writing, having journaled her way through Israel and Asia in her early adult years.
Chris Opachan
Chris advocates for students to develop their writing skills to thrive in an information-saturated world. Before joining NoRedInk’s Partnerships team, Chris taught high school ELA in his native North Carolina for eight years and in Beijing, China, for three years. When he’s not helping schools and districts learn more about NoRedInk Premium, Chris loves to hike, play piano, scour thrift stores, and avoid cliches like the plague.
Sam Carbonetti
Sam works as a member of the Partnerships team. Before joining NoRedInk, he was a middle school humanities teacher for 9 years. Sam has a BA in Political Science and a MAT in Secondary Education, is an aspiring author, and still wants to play center field for the New York Yankees. He's in a terrible place of indecision when it comes to using one space or two after a period. Old habits die hard.
Lauren Behrmann
Lauren works on the Partnerships team, helping teachers and administrators learn the benefits of NoRedInk Premium. Before NRI, Lauren taught TK, kindergarten, and second grade in the Bay Area. She taught at Title 1 schools throughout her teaching career and is passionate about closing the achievement gap. Lauren loves seeing the look on ELLs' faces when using idioms such as "it's raining cats and dogs!"
Alyssa Kovatchis
Alyssa is a sales development representative. Before joining NoRedInk, she taught elementary school for three years in Chicago, IL. Alyssa holds a BA in Elementary Education with an ESL endorsement from the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and loves all things sports (Go Cubs!), traveling, and reading mysteries and thrillers. Alyssa loved teaching figurative language to her students and seeing how engaged and creative they could be.
Lauren Berry
Lauren contributes to the Partnerships team because she believes that strong written expression empowers students to lead choice-filled lives. Prior to joining NoRedInk, Lauren taught English and creative writing for 16 years. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and has published two collections of poetry. The dash is her favorite piece of punctuation—what else is as versatile and elegant?
Catie Leon
Catie is a sales development representative on the Partnerships team of NoRedInk. Prior to joining NoRedInk, she taught social studies and literary intervention classes at a public middle school in Arizona. Catie is passionate about the impact that adaptive literacy and writing platforms have in the classroom. She believes that the best part of growing as a writer is gaining the confidence to break language rules!
Sydney Huebner
Syd works with the partnerships team, where she focuses on discovering the needs of teachers and students. Prior to joining NoRedInk, Syd worked in sales for a variety of startups, and she feels passionate about empowering small businesses to grow and succeed. You can usually find her at a dog park with her pup or testing out new cake recipes in her kitchen.
DeAndre Taylor
Coming soon!
Caleb Callahan
Caleb is a sales development representative who is passionate about helping students unlock their writing potential with NoRedInk. Prior to joining the NoRedInk partnerships team, Caleb helped small businesses grow through text messaging software. When he's not working, you can find Caleb hiking in the woods or fishing from his kayak.
Sarah Threadgill
Sarah is a sales development representative, helping to spread the benefits of NoRedInk. She spent the last seven years selling residential real estate in Texas. She has a background working in outdoor education and studied environmental science and sustainability at Alaska Pacific University. When not working, Sarah spends time enjoying the outdoors with her two hound dogs.
Jacob Driscoll
Jacob is building out NoRedInk's Sales Operations team. With more than eight years of experience in constructing sales operations teams from the ground up, developing and enhancing sales processes, and ensuring data integrity, Jacob loves both a good automated process and the Oxford comma.
Jace Bryan
Jace works cross-functionally to ensure NoRedInk's Salesforce organization meets business demands while staying agile and upstream. Before joining NoRedInk, he worked at Salesforce, where his team resolved some of the most challenging Salesforce Education Cloud customer issues. He holds a BA in Computer Science from DeVry University and has spent over 20 years in the technology space. Jace enjoys riding motorcycles with his wife and taking his family on Dungeons and Dragons adventures as often as he can. Fun fact about Jace: He was a member of the Mars Science Laboratory team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose rover touched down on Mars in 2012.
Jessie Fox
Jessie's team works to increase brand awareness, sustain meaningful communities, and create engaging and authentic content. She holds a BS in Cultural Anthropology and Leadership Studies (Kansas State University) and an M.Ed in Secondary Ed (Chaminade University of Honolulu). Kicking off her professional career as a high school teacher in Hawai'i, Jessie has since worked for two wonderful edtech organizations from her home base in Portland, OR, InsideTrack and EVERFI. Over the summers along the way, Jessie also had the opportunity to teach 5th grade English in rural Israel. A favorite quote from Tom Stoppard: "I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little."
Kim Lynes
Coming Soon!
Anya Lichtenstein
Anya works with NoRedInk's marketing, product, and sales Teams to implement go-to-market strategies, launch new products, and optimize performance. She graduated from UPenn with a BA in English and started her career in book editing and publishing. Anya has spent the last decade marketing for companies like Nickelodeon, 2U, and Podium Education. On her first day at Nickelodeon, she mistakenly assumed that TMNT was a widely known marketing acronym. She was relieved to discover that it actually stood for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Liz Vudhiwat
Liz helps enable and optimize marketing campaigns, expanding NoRedInk’s influence and ability to unlock every writer’s potential. Before this she enjoyed a “suite” life working at travel companies with a focus on email marketing and automation. In her free time, she can be found cuddling up with her Kindle, scouring the web for new recipes to try, and planning for her next trip. She also enjoys cheesy puns and gets a laugh out of seeing translation fails.
Lillian Dignan
Lillian leads the email marketing program at NoRedInk, helping us keep in touch with our growing community of educators. In her previous work, she was on the marketing team at PBLWorks, an education nonprofit that’s all about project-based learning. A proud product of public education, Lillian has both an MA in Education and a BA in Art History from the University of Massachusetts.
Thomas Rodrigues
Thomas works with colleagues from across the company to craft stories that illustrate how NoRedInk builds stronger writers. Prior to joining NoRedInk, Thomas led content operations at a digital marketing agency. His engagements with edtech clients were always uniquely invigorating, so he decided to cut out the middleman. As a cinephile, linguaphile, and marketer, Thomas enjoys observing how distribution companies choose to title international films for their stateside releases.
Lauren Schaefer
Lauren works on the Marketing team, planning NoRedInk's participation in events and conferences. Prior to joining the team, she spent 15 years working in marketing and events for companies in the construction, home improvement, and fashion industries. In her free time, she enjoys cooking and traveling with her husband, delving into hockey analytics, and refinishing furniture.
James Kuhn
James has managed accounting functions at several companies over the last 15 years. He lives in Concord, where his wife is a teacher, with kids in the Walnut Creek school system. James enjoys watching hockey, playing guitar, and traveling.
Christa DeStasio
Christa's role is to ensure the accuracy and timeliness of the details making up the financial records. She has 20+ years of accounting experience in several different roles. Christa lives in Tucson, AZ, with her husband and two dogs. In her spare time, she likes to be outdoors, hiking in nearby Sabino Canon or the Catalina mountains.
Cindy Christensen
As the executive assistant to the CEO, Cindy manages the details necessary for our CEO and the executive team to focus their valuable time on what is most meaningful to the company. As a former special education teacher and a mother, she is proud to be part of a team that’s impacting education in a positive way.