
Stephen Wolfram
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Program Director
Lizzie joined Wolfram Research in 2014. She is currently the team manager and a technical project manager for Wolfram's Advanced Research Group, working from the company headquarters in Champaign, Illinois. This is her first year as program director of the Wolfram Summer Programs, and she participated last year as well. She is excited to share in this experience and make it valuable and memorable for everyone involved. In her spare time, she enjoys music and playing piano, traveling, shopping for unique trinkets, video games and learning about new technology. She has a BSc in applied mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
YEARS: 2017
Academic Director
John Dixon received his PhD in the history of American civilization from Harvard University in 2014. His dissertation unveiled the rich human geography of the eighteenth-century Atlantic Ocean through digital mapping and analysis of ships' logbooks. He joined Wolfram Research in 2015 after a stint at HarvardX working on a MOOC emphasizing interdisciplinary inquiry through material culture. As assistant to Stephen Wolfram, he coordinates Wolfram's newest educational efforts in computational thinking, contributes expertise to the development of new and existing educational products and is involved with various special projects in education and the humanities. John also holds a BA in history and a BS in ceramic and materials engineering from Clemson University.
Academic Director
Program Coordinator
After attending the Wolfram Summer School in 2016, Andrea joined Wolfram Research as the Special Projects department's office administrator. She received a bachelor of arts in applied physics with minors in mathematics and secondary education from Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 2014 and a master of science in computer science from Rivier University in Nashua, New Hampshire, in 2016. Andrea has spent several years teaching students from young to old in a wide variety of subjects and in many settings. When she is not managing the office, Andrea spends her time at Wolfram utilizing her background to contribute to education-based efforts in the Special Projects department.
YEARS: 2017
Program Coordinator
Alison Kimball has a bachelor's degree from Bates College where she majored in mathematics and religious studies. She's been at Wolfram for about a year now as the program coordinator in the Special Projects department. One of her favorite parts of her job is teaching Wolfram Language coding classes in the Boston area. In her spare time, Alison enjoys skiing and playing tennis.
Public Relations
Carlo Barbieri holds a PhD in physics from ENS in Paris. His current research interests are on the boundary between physics, biology and informatics. During his thesis "Inverse problems in biophysics," he worked on developing algorithms to extract biologically relevant information from biophysics experiments such as DNA micromanipulation or neural activity recordings. He spent one year as a visiting PhD student at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He earned a master's in physics from the University of Rome "La Sapienza", in his hometown, focusing on Boolean satisfiability and the statistical physics of complex systems.
He now works for Wolfram in the Advanced Research Group, and has developed the automated data analysis functionality for Wolfram|Alpha. He now works on Wolfram Cloud features such as instant forms and APIs. He is a music lover, an avid traveler and a bike maniac. He finds it weird to talk about himself in the third person.
Peter Barendse was born and grew up in the United States, attended the University of Vermont, and received his PhD in mathematics from Boston University in 2010.
The topic of his doctoral dissertation was combinatorial large cardinal hypotheses. He has published articles online and in the Journal of the Mathematical Society of Japan.
His scholarly interests are in mathematical logic, dynamical systems, theoretical computer science, physics, philosophy and economics. He is one of the first to study the theoretical capabilities of nonlocal cellular automata and model paradoxes with cellular automata. He now manages mathematical content for Wolfram|Alpha.
Besides these, he enjoys teaching, playing sports (especially water sports), debating, watching and making movies and traveling.
Mark Boyer worked as a full-time applications programmer at Wolfram from 2016–2017, but he is currently studying at the University of Washington as a graduate student.
YEARS: 2017
Kevin Daily is a team lead in Wolfram Technical Support. He helps customers learn how to use the Wolfram technology stack as a certified instructor and guides the skill development of other technical support engineers. He also assists as a sales engineer, such as onsite at the American Physical Society's March Meeting the last two years, and as a main Wolfram Language contact with JPL's Europa Clipper Pre-Project.
Prior to joining Wolfram, he earned a PhD in physics from Washington State University. He used Mathematica every day to prototype new ideas and better understand the equations of quantum mechanics. His main research background was in hyperspherical descriptions of few-body systems, including ultracold atoms and the quantum Hall effect (the latter as a postdoc at Purdue University).
He has gained teaching experience throughout his higher education. As an undergraduate, he was part of the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington, where he led physics tutorials in introductory physics. As a graduate student and postdoctoral researcher, he taught various physics courses, such as undergraduate labs, and guest-lectured on graduate atomic physics topics.
His interests include LEGO, board games and playing any kind of team sport.
YEARS: 2017
Vladimir Grankovsky has worked with broad topics including computer science, electronics design and neuroscience. He is interested in transhumanism, brain-like artificial intelligence and cosmology. He participated in the Wolfram Summer School in 2013 and has been using the Wolfram Language since his first year of university.
Gerli Jõgeva joined Wolfram Research in 2014. She has a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Tartu, Estonia. During her studies, she did research in the bioinformatics group and was a TA in programming and discrete mathematics courses. Her current role at Wolfram is as a technical consultant, which allows her to work on various projects, including building infrastructure and dynamic content for Computer-Based MathTMmaterials. She is also a big fan of good coding standards, functional programming and graphs. Her hobbies and interests include choral music, orienteering, racket sports and reading fantasy novels.
YEARS: 2017
Ian Johnson joined Wolfram Research as an intern after the Wolfram Science Summer School 2014 and was subsequently hired as a junior software engineer in the Software Engineering department. He has worked on integrating Arduino and other device functionality into the Wolfram Language, as well as expanding low-level hardware interfaces on the Raspberry Pi and related devices.
His project for the Summer School 2014 was interfacing an Arduino with Mathematica natively using the Device Framework.
He is currently studying at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, majoring in computer science and electrical engineering. Some of Ian's interests include designing and building electrical circuits, robotics, programming, solving problems, learning about math and physics, coaching his high-school debate team and fixing things.
Xavier Roy holds a PhD in theoretical cosmology. During his academic research, he developed several mathematical models, algorithms and numerical simulations to describe and study perturbations in cosmology and the evolution of the universe. He focused in particular on problems related to dark matter and dark energy.
He joined Wolfram Research in January 2015, where he has worked since as a consultant in the Algorithms R&D department.
YEARS: 2017
Valentina Biagini is a data science consultant who provides support in the whole analytic process, from business understanding to data understanding, developing descriptive and predictive analytics projects. She enjoys tackling all kinds of problems and finds new challenges exciting. She obtained a master's degree in theoretical physics at the University of Rome "La Sapienza," in her hometown. For her thesis, "Inference of Local Topology of Wikipedia from Visits Time Series," she used inference methods based on stationarity approximations, programmed in the Wolfram Language. During her studies, she developed a great interest in statistical mechanics, stochastic processes, graph theory, networks and complex systems. She studied and worked on developing algorithms on graphs to extract meaningful information from real systems. In July 2013, she attended the Wolfram Summer School as a student. Since then, Mathematica has been her tool of choice. She loves traveling, analog photography and wandering in foreign cities.
YEARS: 2017
Jason Cawley first discussed the ideas in A New Kind of Science with Stephen Wolfram in the early 1990s, and read early drafts of the work around that time. In the last few years before publication, Jason worked for Stephen Wolfram as a research assistant on historical and philosophical issues, including many topics covered in the notes. Jason's graduate studies were in political science at the University of Chicago, and his wide-ranging interests include philosophy, social science, economics, finance and the history of thought. After the book was published, Jason created and moderated the NKS Forum, answering reader questions about NKS. Jason then worked for Wolfram Research developing Mathematica's capabilities in the social sciences, including the development of CountryData and FinancialData. He worked on the Wolfram|Alpha project from its inception to its public release, including much of its social science content. For the last five years, Jason has been Director of Architecture at Wolfram Solutions, the consulting arm of Wolfram Research, bringing its technologies and methods to a wide range of corporate and government clients. He lives in Anthem, Arizona.
Teja Vodlak is a PhD student at Swansea University, United Kingdom, and a Marie Curie fellow on the Prototouch ITN project, with a background in applied mathematics.
Currently, her research interests focus mostly on computer modeling of human touch, namely the modeling of tactile content by employing multi-scale, multi-physics simulations in order to bridge the gap between mechanical stimulation and spike generation for the virtual prototyping and optimization of tactile displays.
She is an alum of the 2015 Wolfram Summer School.