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Joel began his professional association with computers in the early 1980’s, programming arcade games and instructional software for clients such as AtariSoft, CBS Software, and Electronic Arts. Twenty years later, Joel serves as LiteracyPro Systems' Vice President of Engineering, following a journey that brings together a unique combination of skills, knowledge, and experience. With initial interests in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, he wrote an English language parser and text-to-phoneme program that won recognition by the Association for Computing Machinery SIGArt at age 17. Later he conducted research in cognitive neurolinguistics, neural network modeling and massively parallel computing with the support of a W. M. Keck Foundation grant. As an instructor he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in cognitive psychology, research methods, and statistics, and he coauthored a text used for an undergraduate course in psycholinguistics. He also served as the coordinator of the mentor program under the auspices of the UCLA Academic Advancement Program, the largest and most successful program of its kind in the country. That involvement drew Joel into educational research, which resulted in additional graduate work at UCSB in educational psychology and literacy, as well as an analyst working with student data for UCLA. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from UCLA in Cognitive Science (AB), and Cognitive Psychology (MA, ABD-PhD). Joel’s technical knowledge in computing, cognitive science, and education has proven instrumental in helping to achieve the goals of both LiteracyPro and its clients. | 