I grew up in Granite City, IL playing a lot of baseball, golf, and tennis. From there, I decided to go to a small, liberal arts school for my undergraduate work, Northeast Missouri State University (now Truman State University, about 5K students). There I discovered computer science and decided that graduate school was the right path for me (I toyed with pursuing professional golf, but that didn’t work out!). I started graduate school at UW-Madison, got my MS, and at that point had decided that I wanted to do research on AI in Education, which took me to the University of Pittsburgh to work with Johanna Moore, Kurt VanLehn, and Bruce Buchanan. From there, it was off to USC and then ultimately back to my home state off Illinois. ILL!

Here’s my full cv.

Education

• Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh, 2004. Dissertation: Natural Language Tutoring and the Novice Programmer Advisor: Kurt VanLehn
• M.S. Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1997.
• B.S. Mathematics & Computer Science, Truman State University, cum laude, minor in Philosophy, honors in Computer Science, 1995.

Current Appointments

• Professor, Educational Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2024-present.
• Director, NSF-IES INVITE AI Institute, June 2023-present.
• Associate Chair & Director of Graduate Studies, Educational Psychology, UIUC, August 2022–present.
• Affiliate Faculty, Computer Science, UIUC, 2020-present
• Affiliate Faculty, Curriculum & Instruction, UIUC, 2019-present.
• Affiliate Faculty, Illinois Informatics Institute, UIUC, 2015-present.

Past Appointments

• Associate Professor, Educational Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2015-2024.
• Division Chair, Cognitive Science of Teaching and Learning (CSTL), 2016-2020.
• Acting Director, Technology Innovation in Educational Research and Design Initiative (TIER-ED), Jan-Aug 2019.
• Director for Learning Sciences Research, Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, 2012-2015
• Research Scientist, Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, 2004-2015.
• Adjunct Assistant Professor of Clinical Education, USC Rossier School of Education, 2014 – 2015.
• Graduate Research Assistant, Learning Research & Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, 1999-2004.
• Teaching Fellow and Instructor, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh, 1997-2004.
• Instructor (part time), Duff’s Business College, Pittsburgh, PA, 1998-2000.
• Director, Joseph Baldwin Academy, Truman State University, summers 1996-1998.
• Graduate Student Instructor, Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995-1997.
• Visiting Student Researcher, U.S. Dept. of Energy, Oak Ridge National Lab, Spring/Summer 1994.