Impact compounds when learning reaches scale
When I was a professor, my impact was measured in classrooms, thirty, maybe forty, sometimes seventy students at a time. Each face represented a potential engineer, a future innovator. Teaching gave me something I hadn’t expected from a research career, a purpose that was immediate and human. I thrived on those interactions, on the moment a concept clicked, on the emails from students who found their footing because of something we worked through together.
When I was interviewing for zyBooks, a question surfaced that I couldn’t shake: what does impact look like at scale? As a professor, I was reaching dozens of students; as an author on this platform, thousands. That comparison alone was compelling. But it was only as I grew into leadership that the full picture came into focus: the books I now help shape reach over a million students. That realization became the organizing principle of my career — that impact, real and measurable, could compound with every step forward. That is what led me here. Not away from teaching, but toward a larger version of it.
My path was not a straight line. I earned my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, published research in reconfigurable computing, and stood at the front of university classrooms for years. The pivot to education technology felt, at first, like a departure. In hindsight, it was where everything converged. Every technical instinct I developed as a researcher, the rigor, the frameworks, the insistence on evidence, has made me a grounded strategist. And years of advising students through some of the most pivotal decisions of their lives has made me an intuitive leader.
Today I lead a multidisciplinary team at zyBooks, a Wiley brand serving over a million students annually across STEM disciplines. The leadership skills that serve me most are the ones that work together — developing people, aligning diverse teams around a shared purpose, and creating structure that allows innovation to thrive. Earlier in my journey, I needed someone who believed in my potential before I did. Now, I strive to be that person for others.
Scale is not something that happened to my career. It is something I chose — because impact compounds with scale, but so does responsibility. To lead at this level is to commit, every day, to leaving every person and every student better than you found them.
