MEET THE TEAM

Marcella has a Master's degree in Social Work from Hunter College, New York, where she specialized in group and community work, and a B.Sc. in Psychology from Colorado State University. Her experience includes teaching music and movement in schools in the USA and UK, as a Social Worker with alcohol and drug dependent youth, and as a group leader facilitating support groups for cancer patients. She founded and directs Music Shakers, providing classes to children, parents and caregivers in order to foster experiential learning of music and movement, enhance early childhood development and build communities of families. She is also a member of Science Capital, an independent non-profit company which provides a direct link between academic and business experts. At Syngli, she advises on educational entrepreneurship, and adaptation of the platform to children and learners with communication disorders.

Samantha has a B.Ed. in Secondary Science Education and an M.A. in Educational Leadership, from McGill University. She is the founder and head educator at Frosst Learning Centre. She has also received training in the Orton-Gillingham approach. Samantha specializes in teaching individuals with language-based learning disabilities such as dyslexia. As an individual with dyslexia, she understands firsthand how challenging school and learning can be when you struggle with reading and writing. An unwavering desire to teach fuels her passion to apply and develop methodologies and processes to accelerate a student's learning ability.

Steven has over 15 years experience designing and building strategy, prototypes, products and user experiences. Through his career he has developed an extensive and varied technical background but understands that great engineering cannot build great products without the foundation of a cohesive user story. He is a strong believer in User-Centered design and helps to grow strong companies and products through critical analysis of user research, the creation of new experience paradigms, diving into the technical details and large quantities of tea. Steven holds a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and has over 140 US patents to date in the fields of mechanical design, short-range wireless communication, security, user interfaces and others.

Abby has a Bachelor's Degree in Radio, TV and Film and a Masters and PhD in Information Science. Prior to her appointment as Professor and Program Director of the User Experience Design program at Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU), she held held faculty positions at Syracuse, Drexel and Ryerson, and taught User-Centered Design, Usability, UX, Knowledge Management, Information Architecture, and Digital Reference. She additionally spent time working as a researcher at CNN, and in educational technology for IBM. She was the founding Director for Social Science Research in a $23M Canadian Centre of Excellence that served as both a research network and commercialization engine in order to address complex issues in digital media and transform multidisciplinary research into user-centered solutions. Her research bridges computer science, humanities, communication studies, information management, and media studies, and focuses on understanding how humans seek, use, share, manipulate, store, retrieve, and organize digital multimedia. She is advising Syngli on its own UX design and testing, including its incorporation of gamification elements.

Jesse's research is on human emotional intelligence, its cultural and social dependencies, and its application in ethical computational intelligence. He studies sociological, psychological, economic, neuroscientific, anthropological and philosophical approaches to emotion, and builds functional computational models that leverage these insights in application domains such as intelligent tutoring and assistive technology. He advises on how measures, models, and displays of emotion can be used to build more effective and engaging interactive systems.

Randy Allen Harris is Professor of English language and literature, at the University of Waterloo, and Research Director of The Rhetoricon Project. His work appears in a wide range of journals, including Argument & Computation, Metaphor & Symbol, and Advances in the History of Rhetoric; his books include Rhetoric and incommensurability, The linguistic wars, and two volumes of Landmark essays in rhetoric of science.

Kevin is a lifelong entrepreneur with over thirty years' experience developing and working with new business ventures. Over the years he has worked with many startups, emerging companies, associations and major corporations. Clients have included IBM, CIBC, Northwestern Mutual Financial, Microsoft Skills 2000, Supply Chain Management, Philips Electronics, Maplesoft, Virtek and the Canadian Professional Sales Association. His book "Six Steps to Self-Employment" is a guide for anyone interested in creating and sustaining a successful entrepreneurial career. He originated and developed the "Tech Sales Program" delivered through the Schlegel Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University and Communitech, and instructs on marketing and sales in the Masters in Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology (MBET) program at the University of Waterloo. Kevin holds a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science from Western University.

Jeffery is a Professor in the Psychology Department at Wilfrid Laurier University and Director of the Laurier Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience. He uses EEG, fMRI, functional near-infrared spectroscopy, eye tracking, and EMG to uncover the differences between normal and impaired brain function. His applied research addresses a wide variety of problems, including the development of technologies for detecting and measuring cognitive impairments and earlier diagnosis of social and communication disorders.

Brian is a Computer Science graduate from University of Waterloo with Bachelor's of Mathematics. He started as an embedded systems programmer at BlackBerry in 2006. He always welcomes good technical discussions. He specializes in drawing technical talents to Syngli, and telling everyone about it. His main interest is inspiring people, and providing a fresh look at everything.

Sheila's research is in the area of knowledge representation and automated reasoning. Her work has had notable impact on Semantic Web Services and emerging Web standards, as well as next-generation NASA space systems. Of particular relevance to Syngli is her expertise in web- and cloud-based semantic representation, probabilistic reasoning, and data-intensive decision-making. She has advised the company on upgrades to its modeling of users' knowledge states and learning trajectories.

Yasaman is an Associate Professor in the Brain & Mind Institute and the Department of Languages & Cultures at Western University. She is a linguist and works on second language acquisition, bilingualism and language change. She is working with Syngli on testing its approach to adult second (and beyond) language learning, including emphasis on expressive aspects such as handwriting, and on multilingual corpus creation.

Suzanne's computational linguistics research takes a highly multidisciplinary approach integrating computational theories and techniques with insights from the fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics. A primary focus of her work is the automatic acquisition of linguistic knowledge from large text corpora, using machine learning approaches. Another main area of interest is work on cognitive models of human language acquisition and processing. She is advising Syngli on a suite of computational linguistic techniques to upgrade the system's ability to automatically create and evaluate content and responses.