Our Faculty


Have a question or a thought? Contact us!

by email: info@quantumcamp.com

Mountain View QuantumCampus
2065 W. El Camino
Mountain View CA 94040
Berkeley
QuantumCampus
2176 Shattuck Ave
Berkeley CA 94704
Michael Finnegan, PhD
email:
finny@quantumcamp.com
phone: 510-841-4150

Ryan Nurmela
email:
ryan@quantumcamp.com
phone: 510-367-3279

Janis Chun
email:
phone: 559-824-3045

Xiaoqin Su, PhD
email:
phone: 650-391-8437

Joseph Strong
email:
phone: 408-565-8041

Michael Finnegan - co-founder

Michael's interest in science education began with a simple observation made way back in high school.  He loved science but noticed he did not love his science courses!  This small disconnect resurfaced years later, after earning a degree in Materials Science from Penn State University and a Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of Wisconsin. His doctoral research focused on the synthesis and peculiar properties of titanium dioxide nanoparticles. He found that when particles are only hundreds of atoms big, they behave in very different ways.  For instance, they can switch crystal forms with very little input of energy.  In addition to laboratory research, Michael was a floor engineer at Evergreen Solar silicon solar cell manufacturing company where he correlated specific manufacturing steps with impact on silicon crystal quality and overall cell efficiency.  Through a volunteer position teaching math to Oakland public school students, he saw other young students make the same observation he did back in high school.  The students were naturally curious about the world but not about class!  He proceeded to earn a California Teaching Credential and taught in public and private high schools middle schools in California for 4 years.  He decided to directly tap into the innate curiosity of all humans and founded, with Ryan, a company called QuantumCamp LLC.  Michael and Ryan are developing courses in an environment where the curiosity of the student is the guiding force.   

Ryan Nurmela - co-founder

As an undergraduate Ryan majored in Mathematics and Physics and minored in History. As a graduate student Ryan majored in theoretical Physics. Ryan is currently researching an extension of mathematical foundations he names Object Theory designed to do predictive modeling of particle detector data. Ryan developed a blog knotspace.org devoted to the sharing of mathematical, philosophical, and physical ideas. His passion is to investigate, develop and share science with others. Ryan was a lecturer at San Francisco State University and spent over a decade training students for the mathematics portion of the SAT I & II and the ACT. After working at the university level, Ryan realized that many of his students were ill-prepared and poorly trained in both mathematics and science. This  realization led Ryan to become a high school mathematics teacher with the goal of helping a new generation of students into scientific careers. Deeply concerned about the lack of basic math skills that his high school students had, he decided to start teaching middle school mathematics. Ryan is a credentialed mathematics and physics teacher in California and a founder of QuantumCamp LLC. He has been teaching for well over half his life and has worked in a wide variety of educational venues. His breadth of background has taught him that the earlier a child learns math and science the more richly connected they will become to those topics. Ryan and Michael met in their first year as high school teachers and co-developed the QuantumCamp summer camp curriculum two years ago in an effort to bring science back to America.

Janis Chun - QuantumKids Designer

Most of Janis’ elementary school years were spent learning science out of a textbook, but she was very lucky to have had a seventh grade science teacher who hooked her on science. Mr. Kinney enthusiastically presented scientific material in a booming voice and sometimes from atop a table! She continued to love science throughout high school, and decided to pursue a Chemical Biology major when she studied at UC Berkeley. Being a kinesthetic learner, she loved working in hands-on science labs, but was not very thrilled at the prospect of being in a lab as a profession. This realization led her to a student job at The Lawrence Hall of Science where she discovered that she could combine science with her love of working with young children. She loved sharing her knowledge with them and watching their faces light up when they made a discovery of their own! After graduation, she was invited to teach LHS science summer camps and loved it so much that she returned the following summer. Janis was then presented with the unique opportunity to give back to the community and work in an afterschool program as an Americorps member. Americorps really opened her up to the wonders of working with children as she was able to design and implement her own science workshops for elementary students. She found that her students were being taught minimal science lessons in their day classes so she designed classes that exposed students to hands-on science learning through exciting experiments and demonstrations. She believes that exposure to captivating science at a young age really shapes how children can turn their natural curiosity about the world around them into a passion for science.

Xiaoqin Su - Biology Curriculum Designer

Xiaoqin grew up with two sisters in China. As part of their childhood entertainment they would challenge each other on math and science problems. Xiaoqin was inspired early on by her schools and teachers and knew even as a child that she wanted to be a teacher. Xiaoqin began tutoring math and science to high school students as an undergraduate. As a graduate student she supervised undergraduates in their thesis projects. After getting her PhD in biological sciences from Peking University in Beijing, she came to California and worked at Stanford as a postdoctoral scientist. While the research was exciting and challenging, she missed working with younger students. She moved to the Lake Tahoe area and taught middle school and high school science and calculus AP level courses using existing curriculum. Her passion however was to use her vast amounts of experience and knowledge to create truly high quality science courses that could inspire young people as she was back in China. Xiaoqin is excited to bring in tot the classroom technology normally reserved for the laboratory.

Joseph Strong - Mathematics Curriculum Designer

Joseph's enthusiasm for mathematics was fostered at an early age, with the discovery of educational games such as Number Muncher, Geometry Blaster, and The Adventures of Hyperman. His parallel fascination with games as a communicative medium later led him to accomplish a double major magna cum laude in Interactive Media and Game Development and Mathematics. With a more mature and educated perspective, he looked back on the games he played as a kid, to realize that as much as they helped to develop mastery over the manipulation of numbers and shapes, they often missed the core purpose of math—as a language for communication not just about those numbers, but the world they represent. He is very excited to be a part of the QuantumCamp team to help bring this dialogue back into the educational framework of tomorrow's mathematicians and scientists. Joseph draws from his experience in project-based education at Worcester Polytechnic Institute as well as from his diverse pre-college educational background including free study, public, private, and democratic schools, and years of practice in private and classroom tutoring, including parallel instruction with modern interactive educational technology, to inspire both the material and attitude he brings to his lessons.

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