Meet Our Team
Yun-En Liu
Executive Director
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Tony Bladek
Research Software Engineer
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Tony has more than 20 years experience in R & D (his kids’ initials are even R & D) in everything from supercomputing chip design at Tera/Cray computer to software research and development at Pacific Northwest National Lab. Tony has received Bachelor’s Degrees from Whitman College and the California Institute of Technology as well as two master’s degrees from the University of Washington in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Tony’s interest in education started with his parents who both stressed the importance of a good education to his entire (large) family. It continued when he started tutoring in a kindergarten classroom as a young adult and was cemented when he started teaching at the community college level and coaching his kids in basketball and baseball over the last few years. With an interest in the brain-mind connection since high school, a passion for data visualization, and several degrees in technology, education technology seems like the perfect fit.
Alex Badion
Software Engineer
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Alex is a Seattle native who graduated from the University of Washington, Bothell with a degree in Computer and Software Systems. His first job out of college was working for RealNetworks on a DVD player that would copy the owner’s movies to an internal hard drive. The product was declared a “Bad Idea” by a court in California and was never released to the public. Next he matched gems for four years at PopCap games and met lots of great people, some of whom now work at Enlearn. Alex spends much of his time questioning whether he should have hired someone else to work on his house instead of doing it himself. Lately his wife has been able to convince him that his time is valuable and that it’s really nice to have a project takes weeks instead of months. He also enjoys growing vegetables in his garden and fermenting liquids in his basement. Alex greatly enjoys eating cookies, especially chocolate chip. Some of the better ones to be found in the city are at Delancey pizza, Macrina bakery, and Slab sandwiches. To compensate for his love of cookies he plays water polo with the Seattle Otters, indoor soccer with old PopCap colleagues, and practices yoga with his wife.
Zoran Popović
Founder & Chief Scientist
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Zoran Popović is a Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Center for Game Science at the University of Washington, as well as founder of Enlearn. Trained as a computer scientist, his research focuses on creating engaging environments for learning and scientific discovery. He is one of the leaders in the field of large-scale citizen science. His laboratory created Foldit, a biochemistry game that produced four Nature publications, and showed for the first time that novices can be developed into world-class experts in a science domain through game-based scientific discovery. His laboratory has produced award-winning math learning games played by over five million learners worldwide. He is currently focusing on engaging methods that can rapidly develop mastery and expertise in arbitrary domains with particular focus on scientific breakthroughs and revolutionizing K-12 math education. Zoran is known for conducting large-scale educational campaigns including Algebra Challenges conducted in Washington, Minnesota, and Norway with almost 100,000 students. To maximize the impact of his research, he founded Enlearn to develop the first platform that adapts all aspects of the learning ecosystem by specializing to each curriculum, student, classroom and teacher in realtime, towards maximizing learning outcomes. His contributions to the field of interactive computer experiences have been recognized by a number of awards including the NSF CAREER Award, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award.
Jennifer Biely
Director of Finance & Human Resources
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