Barbara Oakley
Barbara Oakley is Professor of Engineering at Oakland University and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, San Diego. Her research on altruism bias and pathologies of altruism has been described as “revolutionary” in the Wall Street Journal. Winner of numerous teaching awards, together with Terrence Sejnowski of the Salk Institute, she co-teaches “Learning How to Learn,” one of the world’s most popular MOOCs (massive open online courses), with over one million students to date. Her book A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra), (Penguin, 2014) is a New York Times best-selling science book. An avid adventurer, Dr. Oakley rose from the rank of Private to Captain in the US Army, during which time she worked at the South Pole Station in Antarctica and served as a Russian translator on board Soviet trawlers in the Bering Sea. Dr. Oakley is an elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
