Team
Dr. Natalie Lao
CEO & Executive Director
As Executive Director of the App Inventor Foundation, Natalie’s mission is to empower anyone, anywhere, of any age to create meaningful technologies that can transform their lives and the lives of people around them. She fell in love with App Inventor when she discovered it teaching high school computer science, and saw its power to rapidly transform students from passive consumers of technology into active creators of it. She joined the MIT App Inventor lab as an undergraduate research assistant during her studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she received her B.S., M.Eng., and Ph.D. in EECS and AI. At MIT, she was Co-creator and Instructor for the Deep Learning Practicum course, and led the trajectory team for the Inclusive AI Literacy and Learning project. Her research on databases, AI, ML, and educational frameworks has been featured by MIT News and UNESCO. Natalie also serves as Individual Specialist for UNESCO's AI & the Futures of Learning project.
Kelly Shiohira Director of Impact and Community Engagement
Kelly has a long history as an international education strategist and researcher and has worked across the full project lifecycle of planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. She designs, delivers, and assesses educational interventions with a focus on low-income contexts. Her work includes the Bridges to the Future South Africa 2 initiative, a literacy through technology programme in four African languages that won the UNESCO Confucius Prize for Literacy, and the PSET CLOUD, an initiative to build an interoperable education data ecosystem in South Africa. Her recent publications include the UNESCO AI Competency Framework for Students, Understanding the Implications of AI on Skills Development, K-12 AI Curricula: A mapping of government-endorsed AI curricula, and Proceed with Caution: The Pitfalls and Potential of AI and Education. Kelly holds dual master’s degrees in International Educational Development from the University of Pennsylvania and African Languages and Linguistics from Rhodes University. As Director of Impact and Community Engagement at the App Inventor Foundation, she focuses on literacy, connecting education to the world of work, and responsible uses of AI and technology in education.
José Dominguez
Director of Engineering
José has been building software for close to two decades, both in technical and management positions, across big companies and startups, while also contributing to academic research and commercialization projects. With a keen interest in educational technology and learning practices within open-source communities, José first became involved with the App Inventor team at MIT when the project was open-sourced and transitioned from Google in 2012. As a platform core contributor, he played a key role in engaging with the larger open-source community, organizing public community calls, and participating in academic and industry events such as Google Summer of Code and Facebook Open Academy. At App Inventor, José focuses on enhancing the platform’s technical aspects and accessibility, collaborating closely with the team at MIT to ensure that App Inventor remains a powerful tool for learners and educators worldwide.
David Petty
Education Program Manager
David is a lifelong STEM educator, community builder, and education leader. For the past 20 years, he was a computing, engineering, and robotics high school teacher, most recently at Brookline High School in Massachusetts. He also coached Technovation Girls and robotics teams. He was Co-Founder of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) New England Regional Conference and Co-President of the CSTA Greater Boston chapter, where he has helped promote computing and standards-aligned curricula for teachers and students across the state and country. He was a member of the Digital Literacy and Computer Science (DLCS) standards review committee, which helped develop the MA 2016 DLCS Framework and the MA DLCS Tests for Educational Licensure® (MTEL 71), as well as a contributor to the 2023 MA K–12 Computer Science Curriculum Guide.
Karen Lang
Education Specialist
Karen has spent much of her career as an educator, focused on Computer Science education and empowering young people to be technology creators. She has over 20 years of computer science teaching experience in the US – at high schools in New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts - as well as international K-12 schools in England, Venezuela, and Hungary. Karen spent five years with the MIT App Inventor team as their Education and Business Development Manager, a role in which she created curricula, tutorials, and their Master Trainer course. She also co-authored the book, “Become an App Inventor” with her colleague Selim Tezel. Over the past five years, Karen has developed curricula and learning materials for Technovation, supporting girls in the Technovation Girls global competition, as they work to solve problems in their community with a technical solution.
Angie Zhou
Instructional Designer
Angie Zhou is a passionate educator in computational thinking, computer science, AI and entrepreneurship. She has been part of the MIT App Inventor Education team and MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node since 2021 and has worked on large-scale computational thinking and AI education roll-out programs such as CoolThink@JC in Hong Kong. Angie has published books, research papers and even board games on computational thinking and AI education. She has extensive experience in curriculum design, teacher training and teaching. She started teaching coding and computer science to K-12 students in 2014. She has an undergraduate degree in Engineering from the University of Cambridge.
Michael Gallagher
Principal Engineer
Michael has years of experience in enterprise software, having worked extensively with Salesforce’s platform before joining Thunkable, where he contributed to both the core product and the tech stack that enabled rapid development and scaling. He enjoys working in small teams, where he can contribute across all aspects of a product, from architecture to user experience. His focus is on cloud infrastructure and platform engineering, with an emphasis on CI/CD and improving developer experience. He’s interested in lowering barriers to open-source contribution by improving tooling and workflows. A hands-on learner himself, Michael finds App Inventor’s build-first teaching model especially meaningful.
Andrew Whitacre
Communications Manager
Andrew comes with an extensive background in strategic communications planning and management, with projects including website design, social media platform development and training, press outreach, product launches, fundraising campaign support, and event promotions. As a past communications staffer with the Foundation’s colleagues at MIT RAISE, he brings knowledge of the AI and education policy environment and, though ongoing work with MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing, a broad network of collaborators studying teacher education.
Tianyi (Tony) Huang
AI Research Fellow
Tianyi (Tony) Huang is a Masters Student at the University of Tokyo in Japan and an ML Engineer at Cleanlab. He leads research and development on trustworthy large language model systems, federated learning, and accessible AI tools for education. Tony has contributed to the MIT App Inventor Lab through Google Summer of Code '25, published research at top conferences including ICLR, NeurIPS, and AAAI, and founded App-In Club, a global nonprofit empowering students to build impactful apps. As the first Student Ambassador and now AI Research Fellow of the App Inventor Foundation, he continues to support its mission of inspiring learners worldwide to create meaningful AI and app solutions.
Board
Prof. Hal Abelson
Board Member
Hal is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the EECS department at MIT and a Fellow of the IEEE. His work in making information technology more accessible for all has made him a worldwide leader in computer science education. He is a founding director of Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, the Free Software Foundation, and the App Inventor project. Throughout his impressive career, he has played key roles in fostering MIT institutional educational technology initiatives and has served as co-chair of the MIT Council on Educational Technology. He has received many awards for teaching computer science, including the Bose Award, the Taylor L. Booth Education Award, and the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education.
Mark Friedman
Board Member
Mark is a co-founder of the App Inventor project, led its initial development at Google as tech lead and manager, and is currently an MIT Research Affiliate at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He has supported the growth of App Inventor from a small research project to a global platform used by millions of learners and professional app developers alike, and he continues to be dedicated to its ongoing and expanding mission. Mark has been a technology leader at companies large (e.g., Google, Microsoft, Oracle) and small (e.g., Thunkable, Piper). He also serves as an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of San Francisco. His long-standing interests are to open up computer programming to everyone, and to contribute to the uses of technology in education.
Jeff Schiller
Board Chair
Jeff is the former Area Director for Security with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), where he spent 9 years shepherding the development of critical Internet security technology including IP layer encryption, E-mail encryption, and Transport Layer Security (https). He also served as MIT Enterprise Architect for decades, where he manages MIT's Internet presence and Security Infrastructure. Jeff uses his world-class expertise to support the development and operations of the App Inventor project, ensuring secure, privacy-compliant, and speedy access for millions of students and teachers across the globe.
Advisors
Keertan Kini
MPP and MBA, Stanford University
Lisa O’Brien
Chief Development Officer,
Chesapeake Bay Outward Bound School
Diego Barreiro Perez
Chief Executive Officer, Kodular, IRB Member
Caitlin Wild
ELT Researcher, IRB Member
Vince Monardo
MIT EECS Lecturer, IRB Member