Advisory Board
Our Advisory Team consists of people who we know well and, through and through, we really like them. Each has a specific skill set relative to INYW?’s purpose, and they all have a heart for helping educate children in their early years. A brief personal sketch follows for each one so you can get to know them a bit.
John P. Cunningham
John Cunningham is currently an Assistant Professor at Columbia University Department of Statistics. He was named a Sloan Research Fellow for 2015-2017 in neuroscience. Previously Cunningham was an assistant professor in Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He was an academic research fellow at the Computational and Biological Learning Laboratory, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, UK, where he was also a Research Fellow of Christ’s College. He has an M.S. and a Ph.D. from Stanford University (Electrical Engineering, 2006 and 2009), and an A.B. from Dartmouth College (Computer Science, 2002). He previously worked for Morgan Stanley and he is the Chief Scientist and Co-founder of PlotWatt, Inc., an energy technology company.
As a technologist, researcher, academic and entrepreneur, John is interested in effective strategies for teaching and delivering information to large groups of people. INYW? appeals to him in that it offers such a strategy for the hugely important area of pre-kindergarten education.
Sarah Kate Fishback
Sarah Kate Fishback earned a M.B.A. from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business (Social Entrepreneurship concentration, 2009) and graduated Dartmouth College in 2002. SK previously worked as a Consumer Operations Strategist at Google.
Sarah Kate respects the research showing that early childhood development is critical for success later in life. She believes that community programs like Head Start and the Harlem Children’s Zone leverage these findings to ready children for classroom learning. And, SK is convinced that INYW? gives parents and others structured learning plans and exercises to engage young minds, build skills, and bond at home using simple, everyday materials.
Andrew P. Kelly
Andrew P. Kelly has a Ph.D and M.A in political science at the University of California, Berkeley and an A.B. in history from Dartmouth College. His work focuses on higher education policy, innovation in education, financial aid reform and the politics of education policy. His previous research assistant at AEI focused on the preparation of school leaders, collective bargaining in public schools, and the politics of education. His research has been published in Teachers College Record, Educational Policy, Policy Studies Journal, Education Next, Education Week, Forbes, The Chronicle of Higher Education, US News & World Report and others and has been covered by the New York Times, USA Today, and the Associated Press.
Andrew's interest in INYW? springs from the years he spent learning from his mother, a public school teacher, at the kitchen table and from an academic interest in early childhood education. He believes that INYW? is an exciting idea because it provides well-meaning adults with a clear game plan to help young people build skills, work habits, and knowledge from an early age that will pay dividends for both child and adult.
William J. Parry
Bill Parry is currently a Director at Tata Consultancy Services an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization. His education includes a Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from St. Norbert College and a Master’s Degree in Industrial Engineering/Operations Research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Bill is an advisor with several decades of experience in the strategic use of technology for practical purposes. He has been involved in such innovative and disruptive technologies as the introduction of the Personal Computer (yes, he is that “experienced”); the development of several online shopping sites; and more recently the implementation of social media engines in health care, including breast cancer oncology product information sharing.
Bill and his wife have raised four successful and society-productive children and have been involved in education and sports coaching for over 20 years. He would summarize his life’s work as helping people to achieve their goals, personally and professionally, with the assistance of technology, where applicable.
Sarita Yardi Schoenebeck
Sarita is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Her research is in the areas of Social Computing, Social Media, and HCI (Human-computer interaction) with a particular interest in families and how they use technology in home and school. Sarita has a PhD from the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Her dissertation research examined parenting challenges around children’s technology use. Partnering with a local school, Sarita developed an online social network for middle school parents to discuss their use of technology. This path followed her Master’s from UC Berkeley’s School of Information and her B.A. from Dartmouth College in Computer Engineering. Sarita has taken and taught classes in Designing Online Communities and invested years studying how people interact and communicate online.
Sarita is excited to support parents in gaining access to educational resources and building new communities with If Not You, Who?