Education

That's enough to draft with clean placeholders for AT Still. Here goes:

Education

Education technology sits at the intersection of institutional complexity and human stakes. Multi-department workflows that nobody owns end to end, student and program data that doesn't map cleanly onto standard models, compliance requirements, and funder reporting that demands precision — it takes experience to get it right. We've built for graduate universities, health sciences institutions, and youth-serving education nonprofits where the margin for error is low and the people affected by the software aren't abstractions. The through line across all of it is bureaucracy: every i dotted, every t crossed, no exceptions.

Research administration at scale

University research administration is a specific kind of complex. A sponsored project moves through multiple departments — submission, award, finance, compliance — each with its own staff, its own requirements, and its own definition of done. When that process lives in email and spreadsheets, things fall through the cracks. When it lives in a system that wasn't built for it, the cracks just move.

For Columbia University's Sponsored Projects Administration and Sponsored Projects Finance groups, we built a configurable case management system that automated the full lifecycle of project requests through award: sub-case generation, task assignment, escalation logic, email notifications, and workflow routing across departments. Configurable meant that when the process changed — and in research administration, the process always eventually changes — a system administrator could update it without a developer.

Event and program management for academic institutions

For the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute, we built an event management application that allowed staff to generate event web pages with customizable registration forms and manage the full event lifecycle inside Salesforce. At an institution operating across two continents with a complex academic calendar, keeping events, registrations, and attendee records in a system that connected to everything else wasn't a nice-to-have.

Youth programs and site readiness

Youth-serving education nonprofits face an operational challenge that larger institutions sometimes don't: they're expanding their programs into new sites while simultaneously running existing ones, and the readiness of each new site has direct consequences for the students who show up on the first day.

For BELL — an organization delivering academic enrichment programs to elementary school students — we built a Site Readiness Checklist system that tracked the verification of everything required before a new site could launch: training completion, role assignments, operational requirements met. Systematic enough to ensure nothing was missed. Flexible enough to reflect how the organization actually ran its expansion process.

For US Dream Academy, we reduced the staff time required to enroll students by building a tool that allowed multiple students to be selected simultaneously and generated attendance records for the full semester in a single operation — replacing a process that had been done one student at a time.

Funder reporting that holds up to scrutiny

Education funders are exacting. The metrics they require don't always emerge naturally from operational data, and "our system can't produce that report" isn't an answer they accept. For New Leaders for New Schools, a nonprofit developing school leaders and principals, we built advanced Crystal Reports on Salesforce data to meet the specific reporting requirements of their funders — translating program outcomes into the formats that kept the funding flowing.

What makes education technology hard

The pattern across every education engagement we've done isn't technology — it's bureaucracy. Institutions have processes refined over decades, accreditation requirements that constrain what can change, and stakeholders in multiple departments who each have legitimate claims on how the system should work. The software has to honor all of that without becoming so rigid it breaks the first time the process evolves. That balance is what we build for.