Team
We are a dedicated, passionate team of educators, engineers, designers, and advocates.
Jeff Scheur
Founder and CEO
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.
Blake Sipek
CFO
Coming Soon!
Jennifer Dearman
Senior VP of Customer Success
Coming soon!
Mela Drakatos
Senior VP of People
Coming soon!
Rebecca Sanchez
Senior VP of Product
Rebecca oversees Product, Engineering, Design, Growth, and Curriculum at NoRedInk. She has spent the past 18 years building products that help millions of students become better readers, writers, and communicators. Before joining NoRedInk, Rebecca led product development for IXL Learning’s ELA and Spanish products. Prior to that, she developed applications and digital media for educational publishers. She holds a BA from Pomona College.
Robin Sykes
Senior VP of Marketing
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.”
Cindy Christensen
Executive Assistant
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.
Tillie M. Fowles
Head of Product Growth
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.
Jon Katz
Senior Director, Product
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
Staff Product Designer
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
Senior Product Designer
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.
Anshuman Girdhar
Staff Product Manager
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.
Eman Mehrez
Senior Product Manager
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.
Max Hoffman
Senior Product Manager
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.
Elise Gaasenbeek
Product Manager
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.
Stephanie Wye
Director, Curriculum
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.”
Dave Borrelli
Manager, Curriculum
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.
Natalie Chapman
Manager, Curriculum
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.”
Allison Hamilton
Curriculum Designer
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.”
Anna Smith
Curriculum Designer
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.
Katina Vradelis
Curriculum Designer
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).
Lauren McGarry
Curriculum Designer
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
Curriculum Designer
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.
Selorm Quist
Curriculum Designer
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.
Blake Thomas
Director, Engineering
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.
Anita Nuthi
Senior Manager, Engineering
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.
Alec Munro
Manager, Engineering
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.
Collin Doering
Manager, Engineering
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.
Faraaz Ismail
Manager, Engineering
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.
Kristen Riley
Manager, Engineering
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.
Ary Borenszweig
Staff Software Engineer
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!
Brian Cardiff
Staff Software Engineer
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.
Brian Carroll
Staff Software Engineer
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.
Juan Edi
Staff Software Engineer
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.
Juan Wajnerman
Staff Software Engineer
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.
Juliano Solanho
Staff Software Engineer
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.
Micah Hahn
Staff Software Engineer
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.
Charbel Rami
Senior Software Engineer
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.
Ilias Van Peer
Senior Software Engineer
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.
Jinnah Ali-Clarke
Senior Software Engineer
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.
Lindsay Wardell
Senior Software Engineer
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.
Mariano Coca
Senior Software Engineer
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.
Wes Adams
Senior Software Engineer
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.
Alexander Roy
Senior Quality Assurance Engineer
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
Senior Quality Assurance Engineer
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.
Tim Ruble
Quality Assurance Engineer
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).
Jingrong Cheng
Senior Data Analyst
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.
Edson Rios
Data Engineer
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.”
Alex Perkins
Software Engineer
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.
Antoine Dauguet
Software Engineer
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.
Arthur Jordão
Software Engineer
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.
Caique Figueiredo
Software Engineer
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!
Casey Webb
Software Engineer
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.
Celso Bonutti
Software Engineer
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.
Charlie Hanley
Software Engineer
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.
Derek Blankenship
Software Engineer
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.
Erik Feeley
Software Engineer
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.”
Mandla Moyo
Software Engineer
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!
Mfon Eti-mfon
Software Engineer
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.
Nuno Ferreira
Software Engineer
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.
Allison Nasrollahi
Director, Marketing Operations
Coming soon!
Liz Vudhiwat
Senior Marketing Operations Manager
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.
Jaclyn Gochoco
Manager, Partnerships and Events
At NoRedInk, Jaclyn leads community engagement efforts, finding her role within our extraordinary network of educators and students both exhilarating and rewarding. She holds a BA in Marketing from Santa Clara University, an MFA in Creative Writing-Fiction from Brooklyn College. She also has experience teaching English Composition at Colorado State University. Outside the office, Jaclyn embraces an active lifestyle with yoga, Peloton, and Olympic weightlifting. Philadelphia-based, she and her two dogs, Pepper and Kiwi, generously share their home with her husband, Alex. For Jaclyn, writing serves as a sanctuary, offering a space of endless possibility and renewal.
Katarzyna Parzonka
Senior Field Events Coordinator
Coming soon!
Mary Wu
National Events Coordinator
Coming soon!
Thomas Rodrigues
Senior Content Writer
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.
Kim Lynes
Director, Enterprise Marketing
Kim joined the marketing team at NoRedInk to transform how marketing collaborates with sales and other cross-functional teams in our efforts to make NoRedInk available to students in every large school district in the United States. Prior to joining NoRedInk, Kim created growth marketing strategies at mission-driven tech companies. She loves to learn about different technologies that drive equitable access to learning and development opportunities and is excited to be a part of the NoRedInk team!
Anya Lichtenstein
Senior Manager, Product Marketing
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.
Catherine Hasbrouck
Senior Customer Marketing Manager
Coming soon!
Lillian Dignan
Email Marketing Manager
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.
Casey Maas
Senior Enablement Manager
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.
Diana Vacca
Director, Account Management
Coming soon!
Jack Marone
Senior Account Manager
Coming soon!
Kathryn King
Account Manager
Coming soon!
Kerri Favreau
Account Manager
Coming soon!
Kevin Busch
Account Manager
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.
Kristin Ptolemy
Account Manager
Coming soon!
Megan Parsill
Account Manager
Coming soon!
Ronny Smith
Account Manager
Coming soon!
Paige Whitlock
Senior Manager, Customer Success
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.
Michelle Ammann
Senior Customer Success Manager
Michelle supports Enterprise customers on their journey towards a successful implementation of NoRedInk. With 33 years of K-12 experience, as a teacher and administrator in three states, she brings a wealth of experience to the table. She served as a principal and assistant principal for 17 years, first in North Carolina and most recently in South Carolina as an Executive Director of Instructional Technology for a district serving 45,000 students. Her experiences have provided her with an understanding of the ever-changing complexities of large school districts. And yes, she experienced NoRedInk firsthand as a customer too!
Ray Todd
Senior Customer Success Manager
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!
Lindley Leung
Customer Success Manager
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.
Lisa Robinson
Customer Success Manager
Coming soon!
Heather Otto
Manager, Scaled Customer Success
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!
Carrie Rodusky
Customer Success Manager
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.
Chandani Thiessen
Customer Success Manager
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!!!
Dawn Glass
Customer Success Manager
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.”
Lauren Behrmann
Customer Success Manager
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!”
Stephanie Misko
Customer Success Manager
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!
Paige Pollara
Head of Professional Learning
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.
Emily Lin
Instructional Content Specialist
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.
Maggie Hagan-Brayton
Lead, Professional Learning
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.
Kristina Crouch
Professional Learning Specialist
Coming soon!
Liz Bennett
Professional Learning Specialist
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.
Lizzy Stapula
Professional Learning Specialist
Coming soon!
Taylor Brock
Professional Learning Specialist
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.
Paul Clauss
Manager, Customer Support
Coming soon!
Brittany Delos Reyes
Customer Support Specialist
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.
Eris Grant
Customer Support Specialist
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.
Christian Hartjes
National Director, Field Sales
Christian works on the sales team, specifically supporting and scaling the field sales organization. Before joining NoRedInk, Christian led various sales teams at Binti and Newsela. Christian enjoys traveling, playing basketball and spending time with his growing family. (He and his wife recently had a baby boy named Owen.) Christian enjoys writing because he finds it therapeutic and is excited about the opportunity to support students in expressing their voices through writing.
Sheryl Colaur
Solutions Architect & Manager, Sales Development
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”!
Alyssa Kovatchis
Partnerships
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.
Amanda Diesel
Partnerships
Coming soon!
Brian Owen
Partnerships
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.
Chris Opachan
Partnerships
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.
John Dean
Partnerships
John is part of the Partnerships Team at NoRedInk. Before joining, he worked in public education as a teacher, principal, English Learner program coordinator, state and federal program administrator, and a Curriculum and Technology Director. He loves soccer, woodworking, being in the mountains, and cooking. As someone who struggled as a writer himself, John loves to help educators and students unlock language.
Lauren Berry
Partnerships
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?
Michael Ting
Partnerships
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.
Mike Stanczak
Partnerships
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.
Pete Brunetta
Partnerships
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.
Shaheen Khal
Partnerships
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.
Neusha Sayadian
Director, FP&A
Coming soon!
Faith Sparrow
Director, Revenue Operations
Coming soon!
Jacob Driscoll
Revenue Operations Analyst
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.
Jon Kuskie
Salesforce Developer
Coming soon!
James Kuhn
Controller
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
Staff Accountant
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.
Nick Giammaria
Manager, Revenue Operations
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.
Bob Green
Integrations Specialist
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.
Kelly Rickert
Revenue Operations Analyst
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.
Tina Hatziathanassiou
Director, People Operations
Coming soon!
Josh Goss
Senior IT Manager
Coming soon!
Marnée Richardson
Talent Acquisition Specialist
Marnée is a recruiter helping NoRedInk grow its teams. Before joining NoRedInk, she hired primarily engineers for various tech companies. Marnée is a musician, and her primary instrument is her voice – which she uses to croon and sometimes melt faces. Writing poetry and lyrics helps her express what she’s feeling and experiencing.
Tacy Reading
People Operations Generalist
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.