Florin Gheorghiu Email & Phone Number

London, Gb

London, Gb

London, England, United Kingdom

CONTEXT: Young adults spend a lot of time learning independently online (https://www.tomorrow.org/publications/free-agent-learning/). The problem is that their learning often goes unrecognised and it’s difficult to find reliable ways to asses that learning for feedback and accreditation.CHALLENGE: At ITZA, I lead the R&D efforts to evaluate independent learning and higher-order thinking activities through LLMs, so that we can give young adults personalised feedback, recognise, support and accredit their learning. The work involves de-risking product features from a technical perspective through building prototypes that involve prompt engineering, RAG pipelines and vector search capabilities. I typically take features from 0 to 1, working closely with the designers, engineers and product owners to ship LLM-driven features.I also help translate research on learning science into a practical pedagogy for a learning model used by both the content and product teams to create learning experiences.

CONTEXT: ITZA delivers annual live learning competitions to large audiences globally for partners such as World Wildlife Fund. These require the coordination of product, content and marketing releases to acquire, activate and retain learners on the platform.CHALLENGE: I was responsible for delivering the product in time for each competition and coordinating the content and marketing teams to release features and content for 3 websites: learner, teacher and partner portals. With a very small tech team, I often also found myself with my hands on the keyboard, shipping features.Personal highlights include:- Ran sprint planning, retrospectives and daily stand-ups for the engineering team.- Architected a serverless back-end system to track more than 30 metrics on learning behaviour on MongoDB’s Atlas infrastructure.- Directly managed a team of 2 analysts to produce regular reports and dashboards for the whole company and an internal data analysis Python package- Conceived and executed a digital currency to increase user engagement.- Coded and released a Chrome Extension that tracked activity on educational videos on Youtube.

CONTEXT: I joined ITZA as the 5th team member while doing my PhD, helping shape the early strategy, the product’s pedagogy and getting the product off the ground. CHALLENGE: To secure angel investment, a partnership with the World Wildlife Fund and survive COVID, we had to deliver an MVP for running live learning competitions that demonstrated the power of our content to engage young adults in learning outside of school hours.Personal highlights include:- building the proof-of-concept and the MVP in Meteor.js in 2 months- building an in-house Content Management System- seting up the event-driven data capturing and tracking systems with MongoDB and Amplitude- running over 100 discovery sessions with children (ages 10-14)

London Area, United Kingdom

Since 2018, I’ve been running annual 2-day workshops with students at the Design for Performance and Interaction Masters to help them explore their research questions and how to test them.I create the space for students to explore how neuroscience, cognitive science and experimental methods might apply to their design projects and research questions in a hands-on collaborative setting. You can learn more about the workshops here: https://twobob.mmm.page/experimentalI’ve also tutored 10 students for their Masters thesis, coaching them to bridge the gap between their research questions and their design projects.

London, United Kingdom

CONTEXT: Most neuroscience research using MRI in the past 30 years has used very reductive, controlled stimuli to draw conclusions about the brain’s role in human cognition and behaviour. The way human brains process information in the real world is messy and full of information and context, unlike the laboratory.CHALLENGE: How do more naturalistic stimuli (e.g. full-length movies) impact our understanding of auditory processing in the human neocortex?I developed machine learning pipelines in Python with AWS and Google Cloud services to annotate every second in full length movies using audio and visual stimuli. I also helped build one of the largest databases of neuroimaging data gathered under more naturalistic conditions - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00680-2Unpublished work: How low-level is the human primary auditory cortex?Completed MPhil requirements and then decided to take a break from academia to focus on an early stage start-up. I realised I like to built tools, not write papers.

CONTEXT: Aspire Academy (https://www.aspireacademy.ro/) ran an annual start-up pre-accelerator that helped aspiring entrepeneurs from Aspire’s alumni network get their ideas off the ground.CHALLENGE: With a small team of 4, we had to deliver a hybrid program (remote & in-person) that recruited, coached and inspired teams to work on their start-up ideas. I was responsible for the online part of the program. Highlights:- selected and developed the online curriculum and materials based on Bill Aulet’s Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework (https://www.d-eship.com/)- redesigned and built a new website in WordPress- found and scheduled guest speakers- coached 2 of the participating teams

London, United Kingdom

• Tutored 20 students in Romanian, 2 in German and 1 in Maths• Developed a strong intuition of how to explain language concepts to beginners and the ability to convey diverse information to a wide range of people with different needs and expectations

London, United Kingdom

Built and designed the project's website and 2 interactive games with p5.jsResponsible for science communicationProject output: https://2017.igem.org/Team:UCL

London, United Kingdom

Managed access to information in the charity, ensuring the functionality of Google Drive, the public website and 2 internal websites.

Cambridge, Ma

Worked with Dr. Jonathan Kominksy and Dr. Susan Carey on a project looking at the perception of causality in infancy. I recruited participants and ran the experiment, attended reading and discussion groups and took part in experiment design. See poster for details.Also contributed to the development of PyHab, a software for the habituation paradigm written in Python, and coded psychophysics experiments in Python.

London, United Kingdom

Ran a recruitment campaign for new volunteers, using advertising tools on Facebook and designing event posters and flyers. Boosted page likes and audience on Facebook by 50% and got a relevant speaker on international development. Also, I interviewed, trained and supported new volunteers until their departure to East Africa.

Invested £1800 (fundraised) over 10 weeks in partnership with a rural secondary school in Kenya in a holistic approach to education development. Projects involved installing water systems, reorganizing study space, implementing health schemes and technology, organizing a health day and refurbishing a laboratory, all targeting the idea of sustainability.Managing the projects flexibly involved researching extant issues (quantitatively and qualitatively), assessing feasibility and sustainability, testing out new ideas and ensuring easy maintenance.Also, adapted to a new business environment, negotiated projects and communicated efficiently with key stakeholders. Ultimately, I developed a cultural awareness that benefited the success of the project.

London, United Kingdom

The project led by Dr. Shashika Vethanayagam from London Metropolitan University and Dr. Yarrow Dunham from Yale University explored the development of British children’s attitudes towards religion and cultural class.Recruited primary schools to take part into the study and communicated efficiently with members of staff and children aged 6-12. Also, ran the Implicit Attitudes Test, created codebooks and analysed data from questionnaires in SPSS. At the moment reviewing literature in the area of development of social attitudes.

Doctor Of Philosophy - Phd, Cognitive Neuroscience

Decided to take a break from academia

Master In Science (Msci), Psychology, Msci, 1.1

4th year master's thesis: Whose is the bark? The dog's or the tree's? Developing automated annotation tools to quantify semantic context.

High School, Mathematics, Further Mathematics, Psychology, German, A*Aaa

Activities and Societies: • Captain of the Basketball Team • Deputy Head of House