Brian Verdine, Ph.D. Email & Phone Number

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States

I spend my time understanding and tackling client student engagement and success challenges, actively driving our research pipeline and promoting efficacy research among partners, advocating for the success of our approach and making it the new standard for social learning, imagining and working towards Yellowdig's future, and ensuring our product meets the needs of our partners while also meeting the needs of their students. Though I have been doing most of these things a while, my current role involves spending more time directly with clients and enables a deeper focus on our increasingly important partnership model, which we believe is a huge part of our success and growing reputation as an education company, not just an edtech product.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States

As VP of Academic Product Engagement I currently lead a wide array of teams with diverse functions. I manage and am the ultimate decision-maker for: Support and Client Operations functions including tech support, maintaining our knowledge base, client integrations, and bookstore/payment operations; Success functions including onboarding new clients and various commercial account management responsibilities like securing contract renewals and expansions; and Product Ownership including overseeing the product manager, product design and roadmapping for things like AI and gamification, and managing the quality assurance team. I also assist with various go-to-market functions as our lead pedagogy/andragogy and research expert, including attending important sales and community design meetings, assisting research initiatives, creating marketing-related collateral like blogs, and helping with competitor and market research.The reputation of Yellowdig's product and customer service are both stellar, leading to excellent outcomes that clients appreciate. As I have increasingly taken on many of the responsibilities that contribute to positive product feedback and brand loyalty, Yellowdig's profile continues to rise. For example, our monthly unique users grew more than 25% over 2023. With work we have been doing on the product and for onboarding/training, I am particularly proud of my role in helping improve our Net Promoter Score by 8 points over the last year and to see that client appreciation of what we have been doing is clearly evident in our 2023 G2 reviews and awards (https://www.g2.com/products/yellowdig/reviews).

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States

In this role I ensured customer success including student technical support, instructor and instructional designer onboarding, and ongoing institutional training and support.

Philadelphia, Pa

My responsibilities included interacting with potential new users, onboarding instructors, building an instructor user-community, developing and communicating best practices, and doing whatever is needed to ensure instructor and learner success.

Newark, De

I have continued to pursue academic research and publishing projects as part of a passion for improving education and an ongoing interest in spatial learning and leveraging technology for education. Due to my ongoing contributions to the department and success in publishing, the faculty of the University of Delaware School of Education voted to appoint me as an affiliated Assistant Professor.The publishing achievement I am most proud of is the Monograph I wrote for the Society for Research in Child Development (https://doi.org/10.1111/mono.12263). Only 4 are published per year and a colleague referred to it as the "Rolls Royce of publications" for our field. My other publications can be found in my Google Scholar Profile (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-94HNT0AAAAJ&hl=en).

My primary services are product development consultation and grant feasibility and writing consultation.Product Development Consultation - Worked with companies in the toy, entertainment, and education industries to guide product development or improve the efficacy of educational materials accompanying their products (e.g., instruction booklets and digital games).Grant Writing Consultation - Worked as a methodological & statistical consultant and SME for multiple small business and academic grants. Have been involved in writing successfully funded grants totaling over $2.5m and have been a grant administrator and report writer for major grants from the NSF, NIH, and IES.

Philadelphia, Pa

SmartyPal transforms passive educational content into personalized, interactive experiences and games. We combine technology, design, and data analytics to drive content engagement for learners and provide insights to educators and other learning faciltators.At SmartyPal we adhered to the lean start-up mentality and my duties were quite varied as a result. I was hired mostly to work as a product developer to ensure the educational efficacy of SmartyPal's technology. Over time I took over management of the front-end development team, tasked with creating the software and interactive content that learners experience and building a web-based portal for uploading content and viewing the data analytics produced by our adaptive learning engine. The front-end development work included handling UX/UI testing, collecting and analyzing user data, interfacing with our partners, and carrying out research and development projects. I also worked closely with the back-end development team to create and manage data collection and analytics schemes, allowing us to send them to our web-based and client app data analytics portals. Finally, I worked closely with the founders to establish business priorities, participate in strategic project planning, and pursue business development activities (e.g., meetings, presentations, conferences, grants, etc.). The daily opportunity to extract business knowledge from two Wharton MBA's and to interact regularly with their network was a great learning experience.Finally, I managed most aspects of our out-of-school time program called KidsMakeItRight, including writing the curriculum, designing activities, training new mentors, and recruiting locations. The programs was built around a series of socially responsible, project-based educational sessions that taught children STEM and entrepreneurial skills while making a positive impact on their world. We used our interactive tech, where appropriate, to bring class concepts to life.

Philadelphia, Pa

Acted as a consultant for the implementation of educational principles in iPad applications and an app platform designed to teach children. I was specifically involved in implementing educational principles and making suggestions to better follow preschool curricula, creating metrics to track learning, and assisting in the development of adaptive algorithms to dynamically adjust the difficulty of games based on the child's performance. The adaptive algorithms allow the games to scaffold the learning situation, maximizing training efficacy and making the games fun without being frustrating. I also assisted in writing successfully funded Phase 1 and Phase 2 Small Business Innovation Research grants to fund research and development of new aspects of the SmartyPal technology.

Newark, De

I worked in the Child's Play, Learning, & Development Lab with Roberta Golinkoff investigating early childhood geometry and spatial skills and how these influence later mathematics abilities and school performance. During my time in the lab we designed studies to investigate preschooler's learning of spatial skills from touchscreen apps, study how different types of toys and apps designed to teach children shapes influence parent-child interactions, and understand how different materials might help push children toward an understanding of the defining features of shape categories (e.g., that a triangle has 3 sides). Using structural equation modeling (SEM) to handle longitudinal data from one of our projects, I have shown that spatial and executive functions skills at 3-years-old predict a significant amount of the variability in mathematics skills as children are entering school. In this position I managed all aspects of a research team which included around 20 students and recent graduates, helped mentor graduate students, acted as a statistical consultant for the lab, created conference presentations, and wrote research articles and book chapters with colleagues at the University of Delaware, Temple University, and Penn State University.

I worked as a research assistant with Drs. Tedra Walden and Edward Conture studying the influence of emotions on childhood stuttering. Daily duties included the collection, processing, and entry of behavioral, physiological, and language data from children who stutter and typically developing children ages 3-7 years of age. I also set-up, maintained, and did troubleshooting of lab computers, physiological data collection equipment, and video capture technology.Other assigned projects included creating, administering, and training lab personnel to use a new database system to ensure accurate data capture and easy export to statistical packages. I also led a team to design and create content for the lab website, working with a web designer to make the team's vision a reality (www.childhoodstuttering.com).

Nashville, Tn

I worked with my advisor Dr. Georgene Troseth on research related to children's use and understanding of information from video. Daily duties included managing undergraduate research assistants, designing studies, collecting and analyzing data, writing academic papers, and presenting lab experiments.Select projects:--Programmed an adaptive staircase testing procedure using E-prime stimulus software, to determine threshold presentation times needed for individuals to accurately process a stimulus array. --Used ArcGIS Geographic Information Systems software to plot participants’ estimates of the location of outdoor landmarks on a map and to calculate and visually display descriptive statistics related to human performance data (a novel application of GIS software).--Worked with a programmer to develop two new computer-based visual-spatial testing instruments.Skills:--Experienced using SPSS and Excel for data reduction/replicable analyses (some experience with R and SAS).--Trained to administer a range of standardized tests (e.g., Motor-Free Visual Perception Test, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Expressive Vocabulary Test, Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test, etc.).--I am confident in my ability to quickly learn to use most software platforms and have some programming experience (E-prime, statistical syntax in R, SAS, and SPSS, and visual-basic). Programs I regularly used in the position included Adobe Photoshop, GNU Image Manipulation Program, Google SketchUp, Audacity, Pinnacle Studio Ultimate, Windows Movie Maker, Microsoft Office Suite, ProcoderDV (behavior coding software), and CardioEdit/CardioBatch (ECG cleaning and analysis software).

Led class discussions/review sessions, graded papers, and administered tests for Cognitive and Developmental Psychology classes.

I worked with Dr. Lynn Liben collecting and coding data related to the use of maps for the purpose of navigation. I also assisted in executing pilot testing and development of testing methods.

Ph.D., Psychology

Activities and Societies: Peer-reviewed articles for journals, served on the graduate student council, and was a member of undergraduate.

M.S., Psychology

Non-terminal degree (see Ph.D.)

B.S., Psychology

Minor in Human Development and Family Studies