Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram is the author of A New Kind of Science and the principal lecturer at the Summer School. He is the creator of Mathematica, the creator of Wolfram|Alpha and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Having started in science as a teenager (he got his PhD at age 20), Wolfram had a highly successful early career in academia. He began his work on NKS in 1981 and spent ten years writing the NKS book, published in 2002. Over the course of 30 years, Wolfram has mentored a large number of individuals who have achieved great success in academia, business and elsewhere. Starting the NKS Summer School (now called the Wolfram Summer School) was his first formal educational undertaking in 16 years.

Xerxes Arsiwalla

Fundamental Physics Director

Xerxes is a theoretical physicist. He worked on black holes and string theory during grad school. He did his postdoctoral research in computational neuroscience and complex systems. In addition to fundamental physics, he is interested in the philosophy and foundations of mathematics. He also maintains an interest in the problem of consciousness and intelligence, particularly in mathematical approaches to the mind-body problem.

Mads Bahrami

Science & Tech Director

Mads Bahrami joined Wolfram in 2018. He is interested in developing computational paradigm for any field of research, in particular, STEM education, religion, etc. Mads received his PhD in physical chemistry from Sharif University of Technology. His field of research is the foundation of quantum theory and quantum stochastic processes. He did his postdoctoral research in the EU under a Marie Curie fellowship and also in the US at the University of California, Riverside. Mads is also a lecturer of general chemistry, physical chemistry and quantum theory at different universities and community colleges in Los Angeles.

Hatem Elshatlawy

Fundamental Physics Assistant Director

Hatem joined Wolfram Research in 2020 as one of the research managers of the Wolfram Physics Project and was a participant in the Wolfram Summer School (Fundamental Physics track) in 2020. He studied theoretical physics at the University of Freiburg, the University of Vienna and RWTH Aachen University. Currently, he is based at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. In addition to fundamental physics, he is interested in the history, philosophy and foundations of mathematics.

Alejandra Ortiz

Instructors

Alejandra Ortiz is an applied mathematician currently working at Wolfram in the Discrete Computation team as a Computational Graphs & Geometry Developer. She holds a multidisciplinary bachelor’s degree in Technology from the Center of Applied Physics and Advanced Technology, a master’s degree in Mathematics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Mathematical Biology. Her research and computational interests span a wide range of areas, with a particular focus on discrete mathematics, graph theory, and mathematical modeling of natural and social phenomena. Alongside her academic pursuits, Alejandra is also a big fan of museums, movies, gardening, and hiking.

Christian Pasquel

Instructors

Christian Pasquel was part of the first group to join the Wolfram Research South America team in Lima, Peru, back in 2012. He has a physics background and worked on research during his first professional years. He currently manages the South America Connectivity group, working on connecting the Wolfram Language to external services and making blockchain and cryptocurrency data computable. His interests include evolutionary biology, astrobiology, artificial intelligence, music, films, books, playing with data and everything tech related. A self-proclaimed Wolfram fan, he enjoys livecoding and works on generative art projects using Mathematica. He is a cat lover and had the main part in an official music video available online.

Christopher Wolfram

Instructors

Christopher Wolfram is a full-stack programmer and algorithm developer who has been programming in Wolfram Language since a young age. He has been the lead developer for several built-in Wolfram Language functions (including Nearest and Encrypt), as well as for Tweet-a-Program and several of his own apps. He has presented at SXSW, Maker Faire, livecoding.tv and other venues on topics such as machine learning, data science and IoT programming. Christopher enjoys 3D modeling, Haskell, Swift, history, tennis and traveling. He has been a mentor for the Wolfram Summer Programs for five years.

Fez Zaman

Instructors

Fez works full time as a lexical programmer at Wolfram|Alpha. He has a BS in cognitive science from SUNY Oswego, where he also minored in computer science and audio production and design. His work centers around music, programming, the computational arts and the philosophy of mind. He attended the Wolfram Summer School in 2016 and 2018, and after joining Wolfram|Alpha, he mentored at the Wolfram High School Summer Camp in 2019 and 2020.

Jofre Espigulé Pons

Instructors

Jofre Espigulé Pons has a background in physics. Prior to joining Wolfram, he did research on quantum physics and biophysics, in particular on the magnetoreception of birds and the limits of human vision. He was a student at the Wolfram Summer School 2015, where he used machine learning to identify species of birds based on their songs. He has a broad interest in topics ranging from computational linguistics to computational sports.

John McNally

Instructors

John McNally joined Wolfram Research in 2022. He received his BS in physics and MEd in curriculum and instruction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Wolfram Research, John taught mathematics and physics for K–12 students, where he strove to make concepts from university courses and research accessible to a wider audience. He has also coached for the Beamline for Schools program in area schools. While teaching, John became interested in computational thinking as an organizing principle for education and as an important future skill for students. Aside from education, he maintains an avid hobbyist’s interest in high-energy physics, cosmology, economics and deep learning.

Maria Sargsyan

Instructors

Maria Sargsyan, a research scientist consultant at Wolfram Research since 2018, obtained her computer science degree from the American University of Armenia and is doing her master’s studies in mathematics and computer science at Saarland University. Maria is a part of the Machine Learning group, focusing on the utilization and deployment of neural networks within Wolfram Language. She has significantly enriched the Wolfram Neural Net Repository with pre-trained models and illustrative example notebooks. Key projects include retraining ImageIdentify, integrating Natural OCR within TextRecognize and facilitating the integration with other deep learning frameworks through ONNX support.

Matteo Salvarezza

Instructors

Matteo Salvarezza joined Wolfram Research in 2016 after attending the Wolfram Summer School. Shortly before that, he earned a PhD in theoretical particle physics (performing research on electroweak physics beyond the Standard Model) at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” Italy. At Wolfram Research, he is part of the machine learning group and works on developing tools and applications for the Wolfram Language, with a particular focus on neural networks. His most important personal interest is, by far, music—he has been playing guitar, keenly listening and composing music for the last 14 years.

Nikolay Murzin

Instructors

Nikolay was always into computer science, programming and hacking, but he was curious and graduated with a specialist’s degree in physics from Moscow State University. Then after trying himself as a web developer for a bit, he got into IBM as a research software engineer and data scientist, working with statistical models, computer vision and natural language processing in mostly retail and supply-chain related projects. He enjoys reading books and papers on the subjects of machine learning, math and physics and also listens to a lot of science and science fiction audiobooks. Nikolay likes to take part in competitions and hackathons, quickly dives into new technologies and continuously learns new things.

Paul Abbott

Instructors

Paul Abbott is an adjunct professor at the University of Western Australia. He obtained his PhD in theoretical atomic physics from UWA in 1987, worked for Wolfram Research from 1989–1992 and has been a Wolfram consultant and instructor since 1997. Paul was the founding technical editor of The Mathematical Journal in 1990 and was a columnist until 2010. His interests range from computational physics, applied mathematics and special functions to courseware design. All of his research and teaching since 1985 has used Wolfram technologies in some way, and his work has been recognized most recently by a Wolfram Innovator Award in 2015 and an Australian University Teaching Award in 2016. In his spare time, Paul enjoys cycling, walking, swimming, photography, reading and writing.

Robert Nachbar

Instructors

Robert Nachbar is senior project director in Wolfram Solutions, the consulting arm of Wolfram Research, where he both leads technical teams and develops custom applications for clients with Wolfram technologies. He joined Solutions in 2014 after retiring from the pharmaceutical industry, where he used Mathematica and other Wolfram technologies for drug design, data analysis and clinical research. He holds a PhD in organic chemistry from Brown University and received the Wolfram Innovator Award in 2012. His research and computational interests include chemistry, biology, discrete mathematics, optimization, simulation and interactive visualization. He has been a frequent presenter at Wolfram Technology Conferences.

Sotiris Michos

Instructors

Sotiris Michos received his diploma and PhD from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH). During his PhD studies, he was part of the Wireless Communications & Information Processing (WCIP) Group at AUTH and worked in the broader areas of big data and network science, with a special emphasis on their information theoretic aspects. His research interests span a range of subject areas, including computer science, information theory, complexity, machine learning, telecommunications and control theory, with a focus on their relationships to pure mathematics. He is especially interested in the area of cognitive sciences and, in particular, in the study of complex systems in nature and technology. He has also been involved with matters of academically gifted education, contributing to the works of Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth Greece and having the honor and joy of interacting with many bright students through an assortment of different courses.

Yi Yin

Instructors

Yi is a leading advocate for AI literacy. Her unique background in social sciences and data journalism distinguishes her as an early adopter of GPT models for educational purposes, especially in guiding college students in narrative writing. As the Academic Innovation Programs Manager at Wolfram, Yi spearheads advocacy programs that integrate AI with career development, thus empowering a new generation of tech-savvy professionals. Holding a Master’s degree in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University and possessing over six years of experience in education consulting, she offers invaluable guidance to students navigating the competitive realm of graduate school applications in her spare time.

Daniel Sanchez

Teaching Assistants

Daniel Sanchez joined Wolfram Research as a developer for Wolfram|Alpha in June 2017. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from PUCP (Lima, Peru) in 2018. However, his interests now lie in the foundations of computation and the implementation and design of programming languages. These will be his research topics when he starts an MS in computer science. His hobbies—when he is not in front of a computer—are playing Super Smash Bros. Melee, studying Japanese and playing with his 15-year-old dog, Archie.

Jon Lederman

Teaching Assistants

Jon Lederman is a physicist with interests in quantum field theory and general relativity. He is particularly interested in the emergence of ordinary quantum mechanics and relativistic quantum mechanics in the Wolfram model. Although the Wolfram model relies on objects with minimal structure, known physics relies on mathematical structures such as continuous manifolds for special and general relativity (spacetime itself) and Hilbert spaces for quantum mechanics. To this end, Jon is focusing his theoretical research on how these fundamental mathematical structures may be defined within the Wolfram model to support the emergence of known physics within the Wolfram model. In particular, he is researching the application of category theory and topological quantum field theory to the Wolfram model building on the fundamental research of Baez and Lurie. Jon is also a tech entrepreneur. He is the founder of Spinor, a tech startup that is developing voice AI technology. He is also building a science educational platform called Physica that is aimed at creating high-caliber educational content in physics, mathematics, computer science and other fields. Prior to Spinor, Jon founded and built the technology platform SonicCloud, a venture-backed and award-winning audio technology company that has commercialized audio enhancement technology. Jon worked on his doctoral research in physics at UCLA and Brookhaven Labs. He also holds two master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford and Columbia. He completed his undergraduate work at Harvard, majoring in music theory and composition. Jon is an avid musician and songwriter.

Joshua F. Pedro

Teaching Assistants

Joshua is a research scientist and lecturer at the City University of New York whose work involves teaching mathematics and conducting research in applied fields, such as epidemiology, economics and neuroscience. He was a student at the Wolfram Summer School in 2019 and his interests are in machine learning and probabilistic modeling.