Meet the Team

This is an archived page for the 2015-2016 Club Year.

Laurie Finkielsztein, Club Founder and Student Ambassador. Laurie is returning for her 2nd year as the Student Ambassador for Newton GWC, a club which she herself founded. Laurie has always been passionate about STEM fields. This interest expanded during high school to include computer science. Laurie participated in the 2014 Girls Who Code Summer Immersion program at Twitter in Cambridge, MA. She founded Newton GWC in 2014, and founded 4 more GWC Clubs in nearby towns in 2015. Laurie lives in Newton, and is currently a senior in high school. She is a member of her school's robotics team, math team and girls varsity basketball team.

Liz Rowland, Club Advisor. Liz is returning for her 2nd year as the Newton GWC club advisor. Liz is a Teen Librarian at the Newton Free Public Library, where she organizes a variety of programs for teens. Check out her Library Guides at newtonfreelibrary.net.

Emily Little, Volunteer Instructor. Emily is a Software Engineer at Fiksu, Inc. in Boston. She graduated from Amherst College in 2013, and has been working at Fiksu since. In college Emily worked as a computer science Teaching Assistant and Tutor. Right now she's building a Financial Billing system. In the past she has worked mostly on UI's and front-end systems.

Pei Xiong Liu, Volunteer Instructor. Pei is a Software Engineer at Fiksu, Inc. In Boston. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 2012. He has taught middle school reading and science, as well as teaching coding to adults at New York's Dev Bootcamp.

Casey McNamara, Volunteer Instructor. Casey is a Software Engineer at Google, Inc. in Cambridge. She earned her undergraduate degree in Computer Science from MIT in 2013 and her Master's degree in Computer Science from MIT in 2014.

David Miller, Volunteer Instructor. David is returning for his 2nd year as an instructor at Newton GWC. He currently works as a Software Engineer at Google, Inc. in Cambridge. A long time software industry veteran, he has 20 years of experience building technology for speech recognition, text understanding, bioinformatics, radio communications, electronic books, and web search. David has lectured, tutored, and run enrichment groups in homes, schools, and universities, working with students from Kindergarten through college. He has coached Newton Girls Soccer and the Bigelow Middle School Math Team. David lives in Newton with his wife and three daughters. You can follow David on Google+.