About Us
Dominic
Dominic’s interest in math originally led him to pursue an engineering degree at UC Berkeley, where he would often tutor friends in their math and science classes. After four years of school and a year working as an engineer, he came to two conclusions that led to a career change: 1) he enjoyed the math on its own more than its applications to engineering, and 2) he loved helping others find delight in discovering the beauty and order in math. Dominic has been a high school math teacher in Oakland public schools for the past 10 years, and has tutored both in person and virtually since even before that. He loves asking the right questions to help students solidify their conceptual understanding of the material, and making up problems that stretch students’ ability to apply new ideas. Most of all he loves the fun of doing math collaboratively, trading solution paths and building on one another’s ideas. When not teaching and doing math, Dominic can be found playing with his four children at a park, practicing his guitar, or expanding his extensive music library.
Katherine
While earning my Biology BS at UT Austin I loved getting to wake up early on a Saturday to tutor organic chemistry at the university learning center. While working as a researcher during my bachelor’s and after I loved working with new students in the lab, training them on research techniques and safety. While in graduate school at UC Berkeley I took in an unacceptably large number of undergraduates to train in lab techniques. I enjoyed bringing fruit flies to the local middle school to teach kids genetics. I loved working as a TA throughout graduate school - earning a university-wide award for teaching - and unsurprisingly after getting my PhD in cell and molecular biology became a lecturer. Getting students to think like scientists is always my goal - in the class, and while tutoring children and adults. True experimentalist thinking is a combination of rigorous habits and language, as well as the development of a ‘scientific intuition’. Themes exist from the simplest chemistry to the most complex biological systems: how electrons flow during reactions, how macromolecules interact, how system-wide signaling impacts physiology.