Dr. John Newkirk has a distinguished career as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, CEO, innovator and member of the Stanford Faculty. At Stanford, he won awards for his teaching and ran a 30-person research team that pioneered much of the technology that lies at the foundation of modern integrated-circuit design. The focus of this program was innovation, successfully bringing the lessons learned in other disciplines to problems posed by the potential to put millions of transistors on a chip.

Dr. Newkirk then founded and served as CEO of Silicon Solutions, building a class of supercomputers that outperformed the best alternative by a factor of 400. Applications that were running in 3 weeks could suddenly be completed in an hour. Again, the key was innovation, developing a novel computer architecture that eliminated essentially all of the computational cycles. This approach, of reworking both the mathematics and the hardware to get dramatic gains in performance, proved successful in a number of realms, including doing real-time analysis in electric-power utilities, often leading to dramatic cost savings to customers.

Since 1995, John has focused on developing an understanding of what it means to educate well, and then developing technology that would realize that understanding. To support this vision, he assembled a highly talented, multidisciplinary team of researchers, engineers and academics, drawing upon the lessons learned over the past fifty years in education, cognitive psychology, social psychology, computer science, linguistics and artificial intelligence.

Dr. Newkirk attended MIT, Harvard and Stanford, receiving a bachelors, masters and a doctoral degree in business and electrical engineering.