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Our Instructors

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.

Anna Moss

After earning a BA in Linguistics from the University of Chicago and a certification in Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Anna taught English and SAT/ACT prep all around the world for five years, spending summers as a cognitive psychology teaching assistant at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth.

She followed her passion for the science of learning to the University of Cambridge, where her MPhil thesis research focused on improving educational equity via linguistic dialect-sensitivity on the SAT.

When not teaching, Anna can be found reading about sociolinguistics, baking interesting desserts, and traveling.

Brenden Smith

Brendan is an upcoming Post-Baccalaureate student in Mathematics at Tufts University with a background in Philosophy of Science, Physics, and intercultural Religious studies. He began teaching as a History of Science tour guide in his Junior year of high school, and was a Teaching Assistant in both Physics and Philosophy during his undergraduate studies. He wrote his senior thesis, A History of Causality from Heraclitus to Hume, on the interconnected histories of philosophy and physical science up till the Early Modern period. He spent a year teaching high school Geometry and Precalculus, where he also coached the Math Team, Robotics Team, and Philosophy club. In his free time he enjoys hiking, appreciating deliciously weird coffee and tea flavors, studying languages, and reading math books on the beach.

Bryan Malumphy

Bryan has been a Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science tutor for gifted students and motivated adults alike for eight years. He is a Senior Software Engineer working on Android and iOS Applications with a particular affection for Audio Video, embedded USB, and Bluetooth Low Energy Applications. Prior to working as an engineer, he worked with the ACT Collaboration at the University of Pittsburgh’s Physics Department on investigating Fast Radio Bursts and Modified Theories of Gravity. He also has a never ending list of ideas he wants to build and totally could, but never enough time to finish them all. He hopes that by teaching he can give other people this same problem.

Clio Batali

Clio is a hardware research engineer at IBM by day, and a dice-maker by night. A Materials Science and Engineering alum from MIT (with a minor in art history!), she is fascinated by all things past, present, and future. Whether judging middle school debate competitions, teaching food science classes to high schoolers, or giving a TEDx Talk on chocolate, her passion is to share curiosity about the world with anyone and everyone.

Isabel Mormile

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!

Jesse Broce

Jesse is a paleontologist who specializes in early animals and the chemical/biochemical processes that cause the fossilization of soft tissues. He has a PhD in Geology, with experience teaching geology courses at the college level and Paleobiology at CTY. His main occupation is field work, surveying for paleontology and archaeology in the Great Plains region.

Joshua Keller

J. D. Keller is a writer and scholar residing on the East Coast. His pedagogy emphasizes heuristics, learning by doing, and experimentation within the continuity of critical reading and creative writing. His archive centers on Transatlantic Modernism, Postmodernism, and Contemporary Literature. He has been teaching at the college level for 12 years and has worked with gifted secondary ed students for seven years.

Kate Teran

Kate is a non-profit professional in activist and advocacy spaces, based in Northern California. She began working as a teaching assistant with Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth's International Relations courses in 2017. Kate has worked providing operational and strategic support for advocacy organizations including Dream Defenders, La Defensa, Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, Poder Latinx, Community Justice Action Fund, New Brookwood Labor College and many others.

Kate is excited to support the next generation of activists in learning how to make a difference in their communities. In her free time Kate enjoys watercolor painting, getting outside, and taking naps with her Russian Blue cat, Max.

Matt Benet

The founder of edRev,
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

Melanie Becker

Melanie is currently a Master's student of computer science at Northeastern University,and hopes to use her degree to develop technologies that make learning more fun. She has been teaching and tutoring for seven years, supporting students in Spanish, Computer Science, Writing, Psychology, and Math. Melanie has a passion for gifted education and has worked both one-on-one with gifted students and as a lecturer to larger classes. In her free time, she loves to play ukulele, sing, and learn languages.

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.

Stephen Foley

Stephen is a proud nerd and a veteran educator of the gifted and talented. He began working with gifted students in 2008 through the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, and he taught classes or helped administer their programs through 2021. He also served as the academic dean for the Summer Institute for the Gifted's Princeton location in 2017. In 2021, Stephen was a fellow of the Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development at the University of Iowa. Stephen teaches at The Linsly School, and when he is not working or thinking about teaching, he loves word games and Dungeons & Dragons.

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