How scary would it be if this guy was in charge? Oh.. Wait. At the intersection of science and imagination, Nate hangs out with a glass of tea and a slide rule. He’s worked in education and engineering in the USA, Mexico, China and Saudi Arabia, and he’s still never given us a decent souvenir.

Ever met someone so smart they seem otherworldly? We haven’t either but we do have Dr. Ferret to bring a love of logic, learning, and innovation. Juan merged his study of philosophy and physics into a PhD, professorship, then nonprofit. He’s on this planet to make a difference.

We like art – a lot! We like systems for learning – a lot! We like Shawn – a lot. Animation, graphic design, cartooning, Shawn has done it for Adam Sandler to Mattel to Dreamworks to… well, us. We’re pretty sure he likes us the best.

You may recognize the name Gibson matches that of our other artist, Shawn. They share a love for animation, and a love in general. Working on projects like Anastasia, Titan A.E., Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Pick-N-Learn, Vikki brings a lot of talent that is admittedly easy to love.

Philip Connors spends half of each year on top of a fire tower in a New Mexico forest, and that’s no joke. When he’s not spotting fires, he’s putting out grammatical ones for the Pick-N-Learn. His path has curved through the Wall Street Journal to freelance editing to authoring his own books.

It’s a long list of goodness for Dr. Brown – teacher, administrator, curriculum writer, director, dean, black belt in jiu jitsu. We’re not certain on the last one but we are certain there is also a long list of benefactors from her work. We’re glad to be one of them. She has extensive experience in informal and formal learning and we put her to work evaluating our model.

Blanca mixes technical and art interests, languages, and cocktails. We put her to work in 2 out of 3 of those endeavors, that we admit to. A student of computer science, an artist, and a diverse volunteer, Blanca does a bit of everything for PNL.

As you can see from his picture, no Hawaiian shirt Friday is complete without Jaime. Even without a multicolored shirts, feathered boas, polyester pants, or his patented gold tooth, Jaime brings color to PNL as a creative writer and idea generator. He’s also a skilled English teacher and tennis coach known for his “let’s try that again” mantra.

Catherine’s hair and its color change often. Not so with the creativity of her writing and her interest in good fantasy literature. She’d tell me that’s an incomplete sentence, but she hasn’t seen this since she’s busy.