Collaboration Speaker + Q&A

Jan is Co-Founder and President of Mendeley (www.mendeley.com), a London- and New York-based technology startup. Since its launch in 2009, Mendeley has grown into the world’s largest research collaboration platform (1.5m users) and crowdsourced research database (150m documents). Jan was also a lecturer in Electronic Business and Information Management at the University of Cologne and served as an advisor to SAP’s supervisory board. Besides this, hes totally fascinated with Latin-American dances (such as Salsa), regularly attending (very non-academic) dance congresses.

Melanie Stegman, PhD is the Director of the Learning Technologies Program.  Stegman is also the Project Director of Immune Attack, 2.0, which is funded by a competeitve grant from the NIAID, to support the evaluation and development of Immune Attack 2.0.  Building on the ground breaking work of the Learning Technologies Program since 2001, Stegman is taking the development of the Learning Game to new levels.  Immune Attack 2.0 will take advantage of the video game characteristics of immersion and interactivity to make the game into the most realistic schematic of biochemical interactions created so far.

Stegman’s interest in biology education drove her to the research lab.  She has written stories and developed mini games designed to teach enzymology in a vocabulary free manner. At FAS, she continues to use an innovative approach to education and collaborating with scientists, teachers and technology developers.

Stegman received her AB in political science from the University of Chicago, and her PhD in Molecular Genetics, Biochemistry and Microbiology from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. She has also written a children’s book about the lives of several amino acids trying to survive in a starving Salmonella bacteria cell.