Our Board of Advisors

 

Keith Stanovich

Professor, University of Toronto

 

Keith E. Stanovich is Professor of Applied Psychology and Human Development at the University of Toronto. He is the author of over 200 scientific articles and seven books. His research areas are the psychology of reasoning and the psychology of reading. His research in the field of reading was fundamental to the emergence of today’s scientific consensus about what reading is, how it works and what it does for the mind. His research on the cognitive basis of rationality has been featured in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences and in recent books by Yale University Press and University of Chicago Press. His book, What Intelligence Tests Miss, won the 2010 Grawemeyer Award in Education.

 

Paul Slovic

PhD, Stockholm School of Economics

 

Paul Slovic, a founder and President of Decision Research, studies human judgment, decision making, and risk analysis. He and his colleagues worldwide have developed methods to describe risk perceptions and measure their impacts on individuals, industry, and society. He publishes extensively and serves as a consultant to industry and government. Dr. Slovic is a past President of the Society for Risk Analysis and in 1991 received its Distinguished Contribution Award. In 1993 he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association. In 1995 he received the Outstanding Contribution to Science Award from the Oregon Academy of Science. He has received honorary doctorates from the Stockholm School of Economics (1996) and the University of East Anglia (2005).

 

Liron Shapira

Cofounder and CTO of Quixey

 

Liron Shapira is Cofounder/CTO at Quixey, an intelligent all-platform functional search engine for apps. At Quixey, he led the development of Functional Search specifically for apps, which scrapes blogs, review sites, forums and social media to learn what each app can do and how people use it. Prior to that, he worked at Slide as an early developer on the team that created SuperPoke! Pets, which generated millions of dollars in revenue. He earned his BA in Computer Science at UC Berkeley in 2009, where he implemented a fully-functional clone of Google Calculator. Liron is interested in the building blocks of accurate mental models, and considers a reductionist and computational perspectives to be essential elements of rational thinking.

 

Greg Stikeleather

Serial Entrepreneur

 

Greg Stikeleather is a serial entrepreneur who currently invests in both for-profit and non-profit ventures. In the 1990s, Greg founded and was President and CEO of aha! software which produced and patented digital-ink processing technology – aha! was acquired by Microsoft. Greg then led another start up, Portola Communications, in the development of high-performance Internet email software. He served as President and CEO of Portola through its acquisition by Netscape. Greg was also a managing partner at Sofinnova Ventures, a San Francisco venture capital firm, for several years, and in 1999 cofounded Headsprout, a learning sciences company. He served as President and CEO of Headsprout until early 2006, when its award-winning early reading program was being used in schools, homes, and learning centers across the United States, and around the world. Greg was trained in the learning sciences with a graduate degree in experimental psychology. In the 1980s, he applied his learning science research as an instructional and interface designer at Apple, where he developed and ran the first usability testing lab during the creation of Apple’s first graphical user interface.