A brief resume

I live in Oakland, California, with my family, which includes a mom, a dad (that's me) and and a daughter who is now all grown up. I like reading, music, computers, SCUBA diving, and being a pilot. I started playing the 'cello Summer 1997. The various pets, in their day, were very tolerant. And (since you asked) that novel, a murder mystery set in Berkeley in 1978, has two drafts done, and who knows how many to go...

Academic and work stuff

After graduating from Lick-Wilmerding High School, I did undergraduate work in astronomy and astrophysics at Caltech, and graduate work at UC Berkeley. Then I worked at JPL before returning to the SESAME program at Berkeley in 1982, finishing my Ph.D. in 1987. I worked for nine years with the EQUALS program at the Lawrence Hall of Science. It was great, but I left in 1992.

Now I am a freelance science and mathematics educator, working with Meg Holmberg. The two of us operate Epistemological Engineering ("helping you know how you know what you know ... since 1987") and its publishing imprint, eeps media. From 2008 to 2012, I was also the faculty equivalent of a utility infielder at Lick-Wilmerding. I even got to teach statistics, and blogged about the experience at bestcase.wordpress.com. In 2014 to 15, I am visiting faculty in Math and CS at Mills College.

In January 1996, we published our first book at eeps, United We Solve; September 2002 saw our second, Fifty Fathoms. In 2006, we put out our first science title, A Den of Inquiry, Volume 1. Volume 2 came out in 2007; that puts some pressure on to finish volume 3.

In past years, I appeared in a set of televised math workshops for the Annenberg/CPB Math and Science Project. More recently (Winter 2000), I've worked on some activities for their web site.

The biggest projects I've worked on have been Fathom, a piece of software for data analysis and statistics education, and its nephew, Data Games. I was on their design teams. Both projects came from KCP Technologies, and were published by Key Curriculum Press back when those companies existed.

Our local eeps team has also been awarded some NSF projects through their small-business program (SBIR). One of them essentially made Fathom science-friendly; the thinking there is now infecting the CODAP project. Another created a web-based collaborative simulation about the nature of science. Ideas from that project now live on at the UTeach program coming out of Austin and in the Geniverse and InquirySpace projects from the Concord Consortium.

P.S. The answer to the "Motoslybnia Question" is yes. Guro etsimala!

Last updated November 19, 2014 . Caricature by Rose Craig. Photo by Robert Sanborn.