Our Instructors

Matt Benet

Matt has taught gifted students since 2016, both privately and through CTY. This summer, he taught Paradoxes and Infinities and Chemistry in Society. He has also been teaching SAT (185 points average improvement), ACT (7.1 points average improvement), competitive math, AP Calculus, AP Statistics, AP Chemistry, and AP Physics for years. He claims he can "teach anything", and challenges you to test this claim. Other classes he has taught include:

Spreadsheets are Cool
Why Things Freeze/Boil (spoiler, gravity mostly)
Cryptology (and Mathematical Cryptology)
Logic (and Mathematical Logic)
How to Adult (Finance)
How to Adult (Career)
Designing Competitive Math Problems
Game Theory

Nick "Stro" Palastro

Stro started working with gifted students in 2012 as a teaching assistant for a CTY cryptology course. Recently, he has been learning programming and development while teaching an online linear algebra course. His academic interest is in measure theory, higher math about how big things are and if a thing has size at all. He also runs the weekly meetings for the D&D club.

Adam Dormier

Adam is a math-nerd-turned-game-developer with a love for teaching. He has been working with gifted students since 2018 as a teaching assistant for Probability and Game Theory at CTY. During the day, he works as a software engineer at Rec Room, where he works onCircuits, a node-based programming language has helped introduce thousands of kids (and adults!) to programming in a way that is approachable and fun. He is particularly excited about the prospect of teaching in virtual reality one day.

Isabel Marmile

Isabel is a former CTYer and current PhD student in biological anthropology. In 2022, her academic journey came full-circle when she worked as a teaching assistant for CTY's Paleobiology course. She is passionate about science education, and has taught classes on human anatomy and evolution to gifted kids, high schoolers from historically underrepresented backgrounds, college undergraduates, and first-year medical students alike. She also has an endless supply of life sciences trivia to share!