faculty & staff

For more than 20 years David Bobb has been one of the leading advocates for strong civics and history education in the United States.

David joined the Bill of Rights Institute (BRI) in 2013. Under his leadership, the Institute increased by four-fold the number of teachers and students it serves. With more than 75,000 teachers nationwide in its network who serve 7.5 million students, BRI is the nation’s leading provider of free, open educational resources for civics and history classrooms.
‍

David serves on the advisory board for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s National Civics Bee and on the Implementation Consortium for Educating for Democracy, a cross-ideological roadmap for civic learning and engagement.

Author of Humility: An Unlikely Biography of America’s Greatest Virtue (Harper Collins, 2013), and a chapter on Frederick Douglass in a 2019 volume published by Oxford University Press, David has written for the Wall Street Journal and Fast Company, among numerous other publications. Currently he is writing a book on the future of civics.
‍

David earned a Ph.D. in political science from Boston College.

Elisheva Avishai is a strategist, teacher, and non-profit leader who has worked in education for more than 25 years. Avishai has consulted to school districts across the United States and Canada, with a focus on leadership development and building innovative practices. She is the founder of the I-Think Initiative at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, which teaches integrative thinking to students, teachers, and education leaders across Canada and the United States. She has an MBA from Rotman and a doctorate in education leadership from Harvard.

Elisheva Avishai is a strategist, teacher, and non-profit leader who has worked in education for more than 25 years. Avishai has consulted to school districts across the United States and Canada, with a focus on leadership development and building innovative practices. She is the founder of the I-Think Initiative at the Rotman School of Management inToronto, which teaches integrative thinking to students, teachers, and education leaders across Canada and the United States. She has an MBA from Rotman and a doctorate in education leadership from Harvard.

‍

Michael Bettersworth, a native of Texas, currently serves as the Chief Marketing Officer at Texas State Technical College (TSTC) and is the Founder of Skills Engine. Over the past 25 years, Michael has been a key figure at the intersection of workforce and education. His most notable achievement is his instrumental role in designing the nation's first higher education funding model based entirely on student earning outcomes.

This innovative approach has led to TSTC being the only college in the country paid on commission by the taxpayer, rather than seat time. Michael's academic credentials include a Master's degree in Communication Studies and a Bachelor's in Telecommunication from Baylor University. He has authored over 25 studies on emerging careers and technologies and their relevance to Texas business and industry. Michael also holds a patent in machine learning for text-to-skill translation and is a respected advisor on workforce and education policy, shaping industry standards with his expertise.

‍

Timothy Brennan is a graduate of the University of Melbourne and holds a doctorate in political science from Boston College. His research focuses on the history of political thought, especially Enlightenment and American political thought. He has published articles in Political Theory, History of Political Thought, Interpretation, the Review of Politics, History of European Ideas, The European Legacy, and the Journal of Politics, and is currently revising a book manuscript. Before joining the University of Austin, he taught at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Virginia. He is originally from Sydney, Australia.

Daniel Buck is an assistant principal at a classical school in Wisconsin, a senior visiting fellow at both the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, and the author of "What Is Wrong with Our Schools?" His writing has appeared in various publications both popular and academic, including the Wall Street Journal, Education Next, National Affairs, and First Things. He received bachelors degrees in English and Spanish from the University of Wisconsin - Madison and a master's degree in curriculum and instruction from the same institution.

‍

As Director of the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, Lindsey Burke overseesHeritage’s research on issues pertaining to preschool, K-12, and higher education reform. Burke’s research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Social Science Quarterly and Educational Research and Evaluation, and her commentary and op-eds have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers.

In 2021, Burke was tapped to join Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin’s transition steering committee and landing team for education and was appointed to the Board of Visitors of George Mason University. Burke also teaches a course on education policy at Pepperdine University on foundational philosophies and practices. She is a fellow with Ed Choice, the legacy foundation of Milton and Rose Friedman, on the board of the Educational Freedom Institute, and on the advisory board of the IWF’s Education Freedom Center. Burke holds a bachelor's degree in politics from Hollins University, a Master of Teaching from the University of Virginia, and a PhD in education policy from George Mason University.

Mr. Cerf served as Deputy Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, Superintendent of the Newark, New Jersey public schools and New Jersey’s Commissioner ofEducation.  Co-founder of the NationalSummer School Initiative, he continues to serve as board chair.  Other non-profit boards include Excellence inEducation, NJCan, and the Uplands Center Foundation.

‍

In the private sector, Mr. Cerf sits on several boards and previously served as President and COO of Edison Schools,Inc and CEO of Amplify Insight. He earlier served as Associate Counsel toPresident Clinton and as a partner in two Washington, D.C., law firms. A graduate of Amherst College and Columbia Law School, Mr. Cerf also was a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.  Prior to attending law school, he spent four years as a high school history teacher in Cincinnati, Ohio.

‍

Fr. Maximos Constas previously served as a professor and Interim Dean of Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. He completed his PhD in Patristics and Historical Theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. (1993), after which he taught at Hellenic College and Holy Cross (1993-1998). In the fall of 1998, he was invited to join the faculty of Harvard Divinity School, where he was Professor of Patristics and Orthodox Theology from 1998-2004. Fr. Maximos resigned from his position at Harvard to respond to a life-long calling to monastic life and was tonsured a great-schema monk at the Holy Monastery of Simonopetra, where he lived from 2004-2011.

Fr Maximos is the author of Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to the Questions of Thalassios (2019); St John Chrysostom and the Jesus Prayer: A Contribution to the Study of the Philokalia (2019); and The Light of the World: Prayers to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (2020). He has also written numerous scholarly articles, including “Dionysius the Areopagite and the New Testament” in the Oxford Handbook of Dionysius the Areopagite (2022); “Attentiveness and Digital Culture,” in Theology and Praxis from Late Byzantium to Modernity (2022); “The Theology of the Icon” in The Icon; and “Saints and Elders of Mount Athos” in the Routledge Handbook of Mt Athos (both forthcoming in 2023). His most recent book is a critical edition and English translation of the tenth-century Life of the Virgin Mary by John Geometres published by Harvard University Press, earlier this year.

Eric Cook is the President of the Society forClassical Learning (SCL), an organization dedicated to fostering human flourishing through the advancement of classical Christian education. He provides executive leadership for SCL, overseeing the organization’s vision, strategy, thought leadership, and fundraising efforts. As President, Eric plays a pivotal role in the classical Christian school movement, seeking to revive timeless principles to reform education, renew culture, and promote human flourishing.
‍

Eric received an Ed.S. in Classical School Leadership from Gordon College in 2023. He also holds an M.A. in Instructional Leadership from Northern KentuckyUniversity and a B.A. in Education from Transylvania University. He started his career in public school as a history teacher and administrator before moving into classical Christian education as Upper School Head at Faith ChristianSchool in Roanoke, Virginia in 2007. Eric and his wife, Liz, have six children and live in Charlottesville, Virginia.

‍

Colleen Dippel began her career as a public-schoolteacher. Colleen is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of FamiliesEmpowered, a Texas based not for profit parent service organization.  Families Empowered has provided K-12 school navigation services to over 108K low-income families in Texas.
‍
Colleen was a 2013 LEE Emerging Political Leadership Fellow and a 2017 Pahara-Aspen Fellowship recipient. She served on the Advisory Board of the Rice Educational Entrepreneurship Program at theJones School of Business. She is a member of the John Cooper School Booster Club Board and the Dyslexia School of Houston Board.  Additionally, she serves on the Advisory Board of the Thrive with Autism Charter School.  She and her daughter are active participants in The Woodlands TX chapter of the National Charity League.
‍

She considers being a mother to her two children her greatest accomplishment.

‍

Victor Emma-Adamah works in the areas of philosophy of religion and religious studies, at the intersection of the disciplines of philosophy and theology. His areas of specialization lie broadly in metaphysics, in the history of early modern and modern philosophy, 19^th-century contexts of French philosophy and French Spiritualism (from Biran to Bergson), and 20^th-century French Continental philosophy and phenomenology (M. Merleau-Ponty, E. Levinas, M. Henry). His research explores themes of personhood and modern conceptions of subjectivity and humanisms; philosophies of body and materiality; the philosophy of technology; metaphysics and spiritual realisms; as well as global histories of philosophy, African thought and practice. The overall arc of his research interest is the quest for a deeper understanding of the diverse facets of the modern self and ways of being, in order to recover the dimension of a meaningful spiritual reality for life. Before taking up his present position at UATX, he was a Visiting Scholar and part-time lecturer in the Philosophy Department of Boston College; a Visiting Assistant Professor in Philosophical Theology at Puritan Theological Seminary; a Research Fellow and part-time lecturer at the Catholic University of Toulouse, France. He is completing a monograph in 19^th and 20^th-century metaphysics titled Being and Movement: Félix Ravaisson, French Spiritualism and the Metaphysics of Activity (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). He is editor of a forthcoming work titled,French Spiritualism: New Horizons in Continental Philosophy (Lexington Books, forthcoming), and recently co-edited a book in 19^th-century French religious philosophy, Victor Emma-Adamah, Simone Kotva, and Clare Carlisle (eds), Félix Ravaisson: Fragments on Philosophy and Religion (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. He has published extensively on diverse topics of philosophy and religious thought, including a forthcoming article in Modern Theology, titled “Transformation and Transcending: Falque, Deleuze and the Experience of Becoming-Other.”

Boris Fishman is the author of the novels A Replacement Life (which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal) and Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and Savage Feast, a family memoir told through recipes, all from HarperCollins, which will also publish his new novel, The Unwanted, in 2025. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University and the University of Montana, and has contributed journalism to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Travel + Leisure (where he is a contributing writer), Saveur, Food & Wine, The American Scholar, New York Magazine, Politico, and many other publications.

‍

Professor Patrick Gray is UATX's Dean of the Center for Arts and Letters. Previously, Gray served as Director of Liberal Arts at Durham University, where he was responsible for designing and introducing a new interdisciplinary core curriculum in the humanities. Before taking up his appointment at Durham, Gray taught comparative literature at Deep Springs College and the United States Military Academy at West Point. Gray is the author of Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic, editor of Shakespeare and the Ethics of War, and co-editor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics and Shakespeare and Montaigne.

“We will give students a structured introduction to the full scope of human civilization and history and art.”

Clay Greene is a scholar of early modern literature and thought. He received his Ph.D. in English and Renaissance Studies at Yale. His work focuses on the literary, philosophical, and historical inheritances of early modern Greece and Rome

Dr. Greene’s scholarly interests lie in early modern England's literary and intellectual culture, especially from the 1650s through the 1750s. Within that broad framework, he studies the intersections of philosophy, theology, and poetry, with a focus on the poetic work of John Milton. His dissertation project covered the revival of the Platonic doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul among English poets and philosophers, arguing that this revival constituted a genuine religious movement of significance. He is fascinated by how individual moral and spiritual considerations always take place against a complete background of metaphysical assumptions about the nature and significance of reality. No era better exemplifies this fact than the late seventeenth century, a time when the “world pictures” of entire societies were in radical flux. Recently, his interests have shifted from the metaphysical to the physical, focusing on the imagination of warfare in early modernity. Still, even here, the focus remains on how beliefs about war crucially depend upon general beliefs about man’s role in the cosmic drama of creation.

Dr. Greene’s next project is a study of the relationship between epic poetry and warfare, focusing on the sublime poetics of physical size and power. "Paradise Lost" is at the center of that study, which also includes William Davenant’s "Gondibert," John Dryden’s "Annus Mirabilis," and short works by Joseph Addison and Aphra Behn.

‍

Kirsten Herlin graduated from Hillsdale College and completed her PhD in English at the University of Texas at Austin. Before coming to the University of Austin, she served as the Director of the Literature Program at Ave Maria University. She is currently the Managing Editor of the Genealogies of Modernity Journal. Her research focuses on religion and eighteenth-century British literature, and her work has been published in academic journals such as Modern Philology, Renascence, and Notes & Queries. She has also appeared as a guest on National Review’s podcast The Great Books and has written articles for The Weekly Standard and The New Atlantis.

Frederick M. Hess is a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on K–12 and higher education issues. He’s the author of Education Week’s iconic blog “Rick Hess Straight Up” and Education Next’s popular “Old School with Rick Hess.” Dr. Hess is also an executive editor of Education Next, a Forbes senior contributor, and a contributing editor to NationalReview. He is the founder and chairman of AEI’s Conservative Education Reform Network.

‍

An educator, political scientist, and author, Dr. Hess has published in several scholarly outlets, such as American Politics Quarterly, Harvard Education Review, Social Science Quarterly, Teachers College Record, and Urban Affairs Review. His work has also appeared in popular outlets including the Atlantic, National Affairs, the Dispatch, Fox News,  the NewYork Times, USAToday, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

‍

His books include Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College (TeachersCollege Press, 2024), The Great School Rethink (Harvard Education Press, 2023), A Search for Common Ground: Conversations About the Toughest Questions in K–12 Education (TeachersCollege Press, 2021), Letters to a Young Education Reformer (Harvard Education Press, 2017), The Cage-Busting Teacher (Harvard Education Press, 2015), Breakthrough Leadership in theDigital Age: Using Learning Science to Reboot Schooling (Corwin, 2013), Cage-Busting Leadership (HarvardEducation Press, 2013), The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday’s Ideas (Harvard University Press, 2010), Education Unbound: The Promise andPractice of Greenfield Schooling (Association forSupervision and Curriculum Development, 2010), Common Sense School Reform (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004), Revolution at the Margins: The Impact of Competition on Urban School Systems (Brookings Institution Press, 2002), and Spinning Wheels: The Politics of Urban School Reform (Brookings Institution Press, 1998).
‍

Dr. Hess started his career as a high school social studies teacher. He has taught at the University of Virginia, theUniversity of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Rice University, Johns Hopkins University, and Harvard University. He is also the senior founding fellow of the Public Education Foundation’s Leadership Institute of Nevada.
‍

Dr. Hess has an MA and a PhD in government, in addition to an MEd in teaching and curriculum, from Harvard University. He also has a BA in political science from Brandeis University.

J. Michael Hoffpauir is Assistant Professor of Political Theory in Intellectual Foundations. Previously, Hoffpauir taught in the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, at Hillsdale College, and in the Lyceum Program in political and economic thought at Clemson University, where he also served as the program’s Associate Director. He has also taught in the Hudson Institute Political Studies program and in the America Enterprise Institute’s 1789 Fellowship in American Political Thought & Modern Practice.

Hoffpauir’s research interests include ancient and modern political thought, statesmanship, and the American founding. He is the author of Between Socrates and the Many: A Study of Plato’s Crito, and he is currently preparing a book manuscript, Vengeance as Justice. Hoffpauir received a B.A. in Political Science from Louisiana State University, an M.A. in Political Science from Boston College, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Claremont Graduate University.

Thomas L. Hogan is an Associate Professor in the Center for Economics, Politics, and History at the University of Austin. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from George Mason University and an M.B.A. in Finance from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Hogan was formerly the chief economist for the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. He has also worked at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, Troy University, West Texas A&M University, the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), the Cato Institute, the World Bank, Merrill Lynch’s commodity trading group, and for investment firms in the U.S. and Europe. Dr. Hogan’s research has been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Macroeconomics and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. He has appeared on media outlets such as Fox News, CNBC, BBC World News, and National Public Radio (NPR). Dr. Hogan is a Senior Research Fellow with the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) and an Associate Senior Research Fellow with AIER.

Professor Jacob Howland is Dean of UATX’s Intellectual Foundations program, which comprises the first two years of our undergraduate curriculum. Previously, Howland served as McFarlin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa and Senior Fellow at the Tikvah Fund. He is the author of five books and one edited book, including two on Plato’s Republic as well as studies of Kierkegaard and the Talmud. Howland’s articles have appeared in The New Criterion, City Journal, and The Nation, among others.

“We aspire to form graduates who are exemplary selves in the Socratic sense: active, reflective, confident individuals and responsible citizens.”

Dr. Tim Kane is a Professor of Economics at UATX and one of the leaders of the Polaris Project. He is the author of The Immigrant Superpower (Oxford University Press, 2022), Balance: The Economics of Great Powers (Simon and Schuster, 2013) with Glenn Hubbard, and Bleeding Talent (Palgrave, 2012). Kane earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego, and a Bachelor's degree from the U.S. Air Force Academy. His writing has been featured in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Defining Ideas, and Commentary Magazine. He is often a guest on CNN, NPR, PBS, CNBC, and Fox News. Kane's Substack is WhyAmerica?

Pano Kanelos is the founding president of the University of Austin. From 2017 to 2021, Dr. Kanelos served as the 24th President of St. John’s College, Annapolis. After earning degrees from Northwestern University (B.A.), Boston University (M.A.), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D.), he taught at Stanford University, the University of San Diego, and Loyola University Chicago.

An outspoken advocate for liberal education, he oversaw the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts, comprising a network of more than 100 colleges and universities. Among the earliest participants in the Teach for America program, President Kanelos is as passionate about teaching as he is about writing and scholarship. He founded the Cropper Center for Creative Writing at the University of San Diego and is a noted Shakespeare scholar, having served as the resident Shakespearean in the Old Globe MFA Program and the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Shakespeare Studies Program at Loyola University Chicago.

‍

David is an entrepreneur, school founder, developer, and scholar. He founded Acton Academy of Washington, DC, and serves as the executive director of Acton Academy Foundation. For the last decade, David has organized the annual Acton Children’s Business Fair of Washington, DC, which has grown to one of the largest children’s entrepreneurship events in the country serving 125 young entrepreneurs with over 5,000 attendees each year. David is also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, conducting field experiments, studying governance, and researching public opinion. Currently, David is working to develop walkable towns in school-choice states where families and innovative schools can flourish. He is an occasional public speaker and his views have been featured by the media in print, podcasts, and video. Follow David’s work here.

‍

Alexander Kolpakov graduated with a PhD from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland in 2012. Since then he has authored and co-authored more than 40 papers in pure and applied mathematics, published in leading peer-review journals and conferences such as TPAMI, ICLR, and many others. Alexander's research interests belong to several domains, widely ranging from combinatorics to Riemannian geometry, to applications in data science, machine learning, and computer vision. His recent work includes a computer-assisted proof of the Rational Tetrahedra Conjecture formulated by J.H. Conway and A. Jones in 1976, as well as a state-of-the-art initialization approach improving the classical ICP algorithm in computer vision. Alexander's work has been featured in the popular Quanta Magazine. Alexander is also Managing Editor of the Journal of Experimental Mathematics (published by the Association for Mathematical Research).

Amar Kumar is the founder of KaiPod Learning, an organization that helps teachers start their own microschools. In the past few years, KaiPod Learning has become the fastest growing microschool network in the country supporting dozens of teachers in bringing their education dreams to reality. In his past experience, Amar was a school teacher, a principal, and the head of product for one of the largest online schools in the country.

‍

Ben Lindquist spent the past 28 years engaged in missional work advancing the growth of school choice nationally. He is a cofounder and executive partner of Arcadia Education. He can be reached by cell phone at 720-933-1699 or by email at bjlgenx@gmail.com.  

For eleven of those years, Lindquist served as a school founder, board chair, and director starting public charter schools and expanding CMOs with a focus on underserved communities. From 1998 to 2001, he served as co-director of the Chicago International Charter School, the largest public charter school network in Illinois. From 2010 to 2015, he served as founder and executive director of Exalt Education, which grew to span three campuses serving 850 students in grades K-8. 
‍

For ten of the past 28 years, Lindquist served in philanthropic grant making roles with the Walton Family Foundation, on the founding team of the Charter School Growth Fund, and at the Kern Family Foundation. In those positions, he provided planning, startup, capacity-building, and strategic planning assistance to K12 institutions, national policy organizations, think tanks, state charter school associations, and resource centers at various stages of development.
‍

From 2017 to 2020, Lindquist served as president of the Colorado League of Charter Schools. He holds a 2009 MBA from the Leeds School of Business at theUniversity of Colorado – Boulder and a 1996 bachelor’s degree in English with honors from St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict in CentralMinnesota. In 2021 and early 2022, he completed 12 courses towards a masters in executive ministry at Colorado Christian University. He lives in Lakewood, CO, with his wife and son. 
‍

Arcadia Education Group is a consulting firm that commenced operations in May 2022.  Its national mission is to support the flourishing of civil society by strengthening the operations and culture of schools, especially those dedicated to intellectual, moral, and aesthetic excellence. Arcadia provides targeted consulting to PK-16 schools and networks centered around four service area: talent search, business planning, team health, and operations. Lindquist leads Arcadia’s business planning team.

Morgan Marietta is Dean of the Center for Economics, Politics & History. Prior to joining the University of Austin, he taught at the University of Massachusetts Lowell for eleven years and served as Chair of Political Science (briefly) at the University of Texas at Arlington. He studies the political consequences of belief, focusing on constitutional politics, political psychology, and facts in politics. He is the author of four books, including A Citizen’s Guide to American Ideology, A Citizen’s Guide to the Constitution and the Supreme Court, The Politics of Sacred Rhetoric: Absolutist Appeals and Political Persuasion, and most recently One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy. His studies of contemporary politics, including absolutist rhetoric, ideological premises, the rhetoric of reality, and the role of hubris have appeared in the leading journals in political science, including the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and the American Political Science Review. He is the founding editor of the annual SCOTUS series at Palgrave Macmillan on the major rulings of the Supreme Court and is a regular commentator on constitutional politics. His current book project is The Supreme Court of Facts, on the role of the Court in addressing disputed perceptions of reality.

“At the University of Austin, no one will be shouted down but they might be shown to be wrong.”

Andrew is an educational entrepreneur, championing the advancement of high-quality faith-based education that is accessible and affordable to all children.

He began his career as a teacher while obtaining his Ph.D. in educational mathematics. In 2006, Andrew joined Open Sky Education and serves as its Executive Chair/CEO. At OSE he has developed and grown HOPE Christian Schools, EAGLE College Prep charter schools, Compass after school programs, the Character Formation Project, and Soaring Education Services.

In addition to leading Open Sky Education, Andrew and his wife Carlee are cofounders of MatchED, a social matching platform that is a hub for personalizing education aligned with a child’s faith, values, passions and learning styles.  

‍

He is a nationally recognized speaker on Macro Trends and Innovation in Education, School Choice, and Scaling Innovation in Education. Andrew also serves on the boards of School Choice Wisconsin, and School Choice Wisconsin Action.

‍

Education:
Bachelor of Science inEducational Mathematics, Martin Luther College, 2000
Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Arts in Educational Mathematics, University of Northern Colorado, 2004

‍

Barbara Oakley is a Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Her work focuses on the complex relationship between neuroscience and social behavior. She created and teaches Coursera’s “Learning How to Learn,” one of the world’s most popular massive open online course with over three million registered students, along with other popular “Top Online Courses of All Time.”

Barb is a New York Times best-selling author who has published in outlets as varied as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times—her book A Mind for Numbers has sold over a million copies worldwide. She is the winner of the McGraw Prize—the colloquial “Nobel Prize for Education” and is a Fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

‍

Eliah Overbey comes to UATX from her position as a research associate at Weill Cornell Medicine. She studies changes in astronaut health during spaceflight with an emphasis on genomic measurements. Her most recent project analyzed genomic changes in astronauts from the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission, and she is currently working on data analysis and sample collection for the Axiom-2 and Polaris Dawn missions. Her work launched the Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA), an online portal with the largest compendium of molecular measurements from astronauts. She also serves as Vice Chair of the Cornell Aerospace Medicine Biobank (CAMbank), which is the first biorepository of samples from commercial astronauts, and as Chief Scientific Officer at BioAstra, a nonprofit developing healthcare systems for astronauts. Dr. Overbey received a B.S. in Computer Science from UC San Diego and her Ph.D. in Genome Sciences from the University of Washington.

‍

Christopher Perrin, MDiv, PhD, is the CEO with Classical Academic Press, and a national leader, author, and speaker for the renewal of classical education. He is the author of An Introduction to Classical Education: A Guide for Parents, Greek for Children Primer A, The Scholé Way: Bringing Restful LearningBack to School and Homeschool, and co-author of The Good Teacher: Ten Key Pedagogical Principles that Will TransformYour Teaching, as well as  the Latin for Children series.

‍

He serves as a consultant to classical Christian schools, schools converting to the classical model, and homeschool co-ops. He is the board president of the Alcuin Fellowship, former co-chair of the Society for Classical Learning, and an adjunct professor with the honor's program at Messiah College and with the Classical School Leadership master’s program at Gordon College. Chris previously served for ten years as a headmaster of a classical Christian school in Harrisburg, PA.

‍

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on K–12 education, curriculum, teaching, school choice, and charter schooling. Before joining AEI, Mr. Pondiscio worked at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Core Knowledge Foundation. He was also an adviser and civics teacher at Democracy Prep Public Schools. He began his education career teaching fifth grade at a struggling South Bronx public school in 2002. Before that, he worked in journalism for 20 years, including in senior positions at TIME and BusinessWeek.

‍

He has been extensively published in the popular press, including in the Atlantic, Education Next, the New York Daily News, and the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Pondiscio is the author of How the Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle over School Choice (Avery, 2019).

‍

Allen Porter is a philosopher from New Orleans with interests in phenomenology, ethics, politics, the philosophy of technology, and the history of philosophy. He will assume the position of Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Center for Arts and Letters at the University of Austin in the summer of 2025.

Dr. Porter is a postdoctoral associate at the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education. Before that, he was a John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rice University in 2021. His dissertation, Social Justice Leftism as Deconstructive Postmodernism, analyzed the philosophical foundations of the political ideology nowadays known as “wokeism” or “woke leftism.” He holds a M.A. in Philosophy from Tulane University and a B.A. in German from Princeton University.

Dr. Porter is most known for his work on transhumanism and posthumanism. He is currently producing an edited volume, Phenomenology & Posthumanism(s), for Springer’s Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture book series, and he will contribute the chapter “The Future of Transhumanism” for the new edition of Michel Tibayrenc’s On Human Nature. Dr. Porter’s other lines of research and publication projects are united by his concern to elaborate and apply the Heideggerian existential
phenomenology which provides the primary philosophical and methodological ground for all his work.

Dr. Porter has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, and the International Journal of Philosophical Studies, as well as in The Wall Street Journal, Law & Liberty, and RealClearPolitics, among others. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. When not preoccupied with philosophy, professional matters, politics, or the mundane necessities of everyday life, he enjoys powerlifting, videogaming, IPAs, and watching Red Letter Media.

‍

MacKenzie Price, co-founder of 2hrLearning and Alpha Schools, is revolutionizing K-12 education. Her 2hr Learning platform harnesses the power of AI to offer students personalized, mastery learning, allowing them to spend just 2 hours a day on academics while scoring in the top 2% nationally, freeing up most of their day to pursue passions, learn life skills and do project-based workshops.

‍

Price shares her ideas about reimagining education with her considerable social media presence, including her 300K followers on Instagram, her YouTube channel and through her top-rated Future ofEducation podcast (top 5 Apple podcast in Kids & Family). Price sits on theForbes Technology Council. She serves as an education consultant for critically acclaimed learning apps and participated in Harvard-led research focusing on student motivation.

‍

A Stanford University grad with a BA in Psychology, Price lives in Austin, Texas with her family.

Alex Priou received a Ph.D. and M.A. in Philosophy from Tulane University, an M.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Connecticut.

Priou is the author of three books on Plato: "Becoming Socrates: Political Philosophy in Plato’s Parmenides" (2018), "Defending Socrates: Political Philosophy Before the Tribunal of Science" (2023), and "Musings on Plato’s 'Symposium'" (2023). He has also written essays on the history of philosophy for various journals and edited volumes in Classics, Philosophy, Political Science, Literature, and Film, including studies of Homer, Hesiod, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and beyond. He also engages in public scholarship, occasionally writing for a general audience, but most frequently with The New Thinkery, a weekly podcast he co-hosts with his two close friends, Gregory McBrayer and David Bahr. Together, they aim to model friendly and fun conversations between friends on texts and topics in the history of philosophy.

Priou is currently at work on a book on Plato’s Republic that will offer a comprehensive overview of its drama that situates the characters, with all their hopes, opinions, and commitments, in the context of the political events that have shaped them. He hopes to show how Socrates’ investigation of the good life amid the political and moral decline of imperial Athens can serve as a model for us today, confronted as we are by similar circumstances. After that, he plans to resume work on a non-historical study of the nature of civilization and barbarism intended for a more general, educated audience.

Anne Protopappas is an experienced educator from Paris whose career spans 35 years designing and teaching world language curricula in prominent American colleges and K-12 rigorous institutions. Anne’s research interests focus on the interplay between education and democracy with a focus on the cross-cultural praxis of free speech, and the field of international education that she experienced through her multilingual and inter-disciplinary training in Global History, Political Philosophy, and Asian Studies at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, Columbia University, and Beijing Language and Culture University.  

‍

A French native speaker who is fluent in English and proficient in Chinese, Anne has advanced knowledge of Japanese and Spanish, and she is increasing her expertise in comparative educational models by pursuing a dual master’s in teaching & learning at the Paris Sorbonne and the New Zealand University of Canterbury, along with her IB teaching certification at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Studies in Education.

‍

Anne brings a wealth of experience from teaching a wide range of students of all ages in the Humanities, organizing international trips, advising students, crafting cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary programs for the Language & Culture Institute she created, and inspiring her students to “analyze and question the world” around them while “falling in love with learning.”

‍

David Puelz is a Bayesian statistician and professor working at the intersection of computational data analysis and machine learning.  He writes and researches on economics, the social sciences, and applied artificial intelligence. He is also faculty at The University of Texas at Austin in The School of Civic Leadership and McCombs School of Business. Puelz previously was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and an analyst for Goldman Sachs & Co. He received a B.A. in Mathematics and Physics from Wesleyan University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Statistics from The University of Texas at Austin.

Isabella Reinhardt works on Greek thought of the 5th-century BC. She received her PhD in Classics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. Before taking up her position at UATX, she was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classical and Mediterranean Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on Greek tragedy, particularly the dramas of Aeschylus, and presocratic philosophy. Isabella’s current book project, Absent Present: Language and Concept in Early Greek Thought, examines the link the between abstract knowledge and language in 5th-century Greece. A forthcoming article from Classical World argues that we may find traces of Parmenidean thought in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, and that these traces provide insight into the play’s presentation of human knowledge, human suffering, and divine causation.

‍

Scott Reznick is a literary scholar who specializes in nineteenth-century American literature, though his research and teaching interests reside at the intersections between literature, philosophy, and political life more broadly. He will begin teaching at UATX in Fall 2025.

Dr. Reznick’s first book, Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism (Oxford University Press, 2024), reexamines the relationship between two of modernity’s most important intellectual traditions. It shows how American literary Romanticism developed in response to pervasive conflicts over democracy’s moral dimensionsin the early republic and antebellum eras as U.S. writers grew increasingly preoccupied with how individuals come to embrace their most deeply held convictions—and what happens when they encounter others who see the world differently.

His work has also appeared in a range of scholarly journals, including Early American Literature; ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture; Arizona Quarterly; and American Political Thought, and he has written about the broader role of literature and the humanities for The Hedgehog Review Online. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Boston College.

Carmen Rodriguez is a Learning Experience Designer and Co-Creation Facilitator. She currently assists with the Polaris Project at the University of Austin. Prior to UATX, Carmen served as the Director of the Learning Innovation Center at Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala. In this role, she led a program that provided workshops and resources to faculty members, promoting deep, active, and collaborative learning for professors across Latin America. Carmen was a Polaris Fellow at UATX, a Future of Freedom Fellow for the Philadelphia Society, and a Jordan Peterson Fellow. Carmen holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from U.F.M. and an MBA from the Acton School of Business.

Ian Rowe is a senior fellow at theAmerican Enterprise Institute, focusing on education, upward mobility, family formation, and adoption. He co-founded Vertex Partnership Academies, a virtues-based, International Baccalaureate high school in the Bronx, and the National Summer School Initiative, serves as chairman of the board at Spence-Chapin, and is a senior visiting fellow at the Woodson Center.
‍

Following the publication of his book Agency: The Four Point Plan (F.R.E.E.) for All Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative and Discover Their Pathway to Power (Templeton Press, 2022), Mr. Rowe leads AEI’s FREE Initiative. The FREE Initiative cultivates a deeper understanding of how family, religion, education, and entrepreneurship weave together a moral fabric that shapes and develops agency in children.