Our Team

Management Team

Nikki Navta

CEO

Nikki Navta's interest in technology started in college, when she created her senior thesis project using what was then a state-of-the-art computer, the Commodore Amiga. She majored in computer science and fine arts at St Lawrence University. During the last twenty years, she has been working behind-the-scenes to help textbook publishers such as National Geographic School Publishing, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Harcourt incorporate digital tools and technology into K-12 curriculum and higher education. Her two teenage sons and their friends provide a touchstone for "what's cool and . . . not."

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Nikki.Navta@Zulama.com

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Amit Shah

Investor

Amit Shah has been in publishing for over thirty years. He was Editor-in-Chief at Harcourt, overseeing Social Studies and Language Arts at Holt and heading up the Adult Education and GED department at Harcourt Supplemental. Prior to that, he headed the Social Studies department  and Advanced Placement and Electives at Pearson Prentice Hall. He firmly believes that the new language of the century is digital.

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Jodi Navta

Vice President of Marketing

Jodi Navta is formally trained as a journalist with newspaper, magazine, textbook and multimedia experience. After graduating from University of Michigan, and retiring from an 18-year career as a competitive athlete, she began her career at Sports Illustrated magazine. She then attended graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism and was a perfect fit for her family business, which is a highly competitive educational services company for textbook publishers. Her 3-year-old daughter's ease of use with digital media, confirms that the next generation of students will intuitively integrate digital education into their educational experience. She is committed to being an innovator in that area of education.

Jodi.Navta@Zulama.com

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Tom Barber

Partner, Editor-In-Chief

Tom Barber has spent much of his working life in the textbook publishing field.  On his first day in the business, at Allyn & Bacon, he was asked to write captions for a book heretofore unknown to him:  Magruder’s American Government, the oldest-selling textbook in U.S. secondary schools.  Later, he headed Social Studies departments at Houghton Mifflin, Prentice Hall, and Holt; in addition, he was Editor-in-Chief at Prentice Hall and Publisher at Holt.  During those years, programs including Magruder's were put online as the market saw the value in engaging students digitally by providing tremendous resources for research, for investigation, and for updating.

Board of Advisers

Bill Freitas

Director of Information Technology for The Lawrenceville School, NJ

Bill Freitas is the Director of Information Technology for The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. He is specially charged with helping faculty use various technological tools for research, communication among students, in-classroom instruction and management, and course preparation and professional development. Mr. Freitas is a 1984 graduate from Rutgers University in Computer Science/Management Information Systems. He has done graduate work in Computer Science at the University of Delaware and the New Jersey Institute of Technology and in Education at Azusa Pacific University.

For nine years Mr. Freitas was employed by Lawrenceville Press, an international educational publisher, where he was senior technical editor and director of new product development. He also spent seven years teaching at Saint Andrew's School in Boca Raton, Florida, where he developed an introductory computer applications course for Microsoft Works that was taught in over 6,000 schools around the world. Before coming to Lawrenceville, Mr. Freitas spent three years at The Webb Schools in Claremont, CA as their Technology Coordinator.

Mr. Freitas has spoken and consulted extensively on the pedagogical and practical implications related to the integration of technology into the curriculum, having made presentations for various associations and conferences. In 1998, he was selected as a Tandy Technology Scholar "Outstanding Teacher/Champion of the Classroom" and inducted into the International Who’s Who of Information Technology. In 2005 he was inducted into the Who’s Who Among America's Teachers and in 2006 into Who's Who Among Executives and Professionals in Education.

Carol Jago

Textbook Author, Consultant, Speaker, Project Director and Editor

Carol Jago has taught English in middle and high school for 32 years and directs the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA. She is president of the National Council of Teachers of English. Carol served as AP Literature content advisor for the College Board and has published six books for teachers with Heinemann. She has also published four books on contemporary multicultural authors for NCTE’s High School Literature series. Carol has written a weekly education column for the Los Angeles Times, and her essays have appeared in English Journal, Language Arts, NEA Today, as well as in other newspapers across the nation. She edits the journal of the California Association of Teachers of English, California English, and served on the planning committee for the 2009 NAEP Reading Framework and the 2011 NAEP Writing Framework.

Find more information about Carol on her website.

 

Donald Marinelli

Executive Producer at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center

Donald Marinelli is a tenured Professor of Drama and Arts Management at Carnegie Mellon University and is also the Executive Producer of the Entertainment Technology Center.

Professor Marinelli has been at Carnegie Mellon for twenty-six years where he served as the Assistant Head of the Drama Dept. (1980-86) and later the Associate Department Head (1986-95). Dr. Marinelli was integral in creation of the Master of Arts Management (MAM) program, the Master of Fine Arts in Acting degree program with the Moscow Art Theatre School in Russia, and, with colleague Randy Pausch, he cofounded the Master of Entertainment Technology (MET) degree program and the ETC.

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Professor Marinelli has lived in Pittsburgh for thirty-two years, coming here shortly after completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Tampa. He attended Duquesne University in Pittsburgh where he received a M.A. in Clinical Psychology specializing in Existential-Phenomenological Psychology. Professor Marinelli subsequently attended the University of Pittsburgh where he received his Ph.D. in theatre history, literature, and criticism in 1987 with a dissertation on the Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti.

Professor Marinelli is currently leading the expansion of the Entertainment Technology Center internationally with ETC branch campuses in Adelaide, Australia; Silicon Valley, California; and Osaka, Japan.

 

Gil Taran

Chief Executive Officer, iCarnegie

Gil Taran is iCarnegie’s President and Chief Executive Officer and also an Associate Teaching Professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science/Master of Software Engineering program (MSE). Taran is an educator at heart having spent the past eight years helping set up international academic collaborations for Carnegie Mellon and iCarnegie in Kazakhstan, China, India, Portugal, Mexico, Colombia and other countries. He has been very involved in working closely with the Russian software engineering education community and with other former Eastern European countries.

As an international speaker in areas of software project management, software risk management and managing technical people, he has trained thousands of engineers around the world from companies such as Bombardier, PNC Bank, Deutsche Bank, Intel, Motorola, IBM, Hyundai, LG Electronic, Samsung, HP and others. Taran has more than fifteen years of international business experience as an executive dealing with business development, sales & marketing and operations.

In the past he has held managing positions in three international companies in the Netherlands, Israel and Russia. He is also the author of "Evaluating Software Decisions: Case Studies in Software Engineering" by Addison Wesley and a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University.

 

Timothy Corica

Math Department Chair at the Peddie School in Hightstown, NJ

Tim Corica has been involved in educational technology for over 30 years, previously holding positions including Director of Academic Technology and Dean of Faculty at the prestigious Peddie School.  He was responsible for the implementation of a campus wide network and, in 1997, launched Peddie’s one-to-one laptop program.  He holds degrees in Chemistry, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University, and his publications include several programming textbooks, and work with The College Board on the AP Computer Science exam and APCS Case Study.

William Denny

Distance Learning Librarian at California University of Pennsylvania

Professor William Denny is the distance learning librarian at California University of Pennsylvania. He has been an academic librarian for over 14 years. For the past eight years he has been involved in distance learning library services. Before coming to California University of Pennsylvania, he worked for Central Michigan University’s Off-Campus Library Services for five years in Atlanta, GA. Currently, he is the chair of the Distance Learning Section, one of 17 sections within the Association of College and Research Libraries.

He holds an MLS and an MEd in elementary education, both from the University of Pittsburgh, and a BSEd in secondary education—comprehensive social sciences—from California University of Pennsylvania.

His interests in providing library services to distance learners led him to become involved as an embedded librarian in online courses. Bill has both taken and taught online courses. As a Quality Matters Certified Peer Reviewer, he has reviewed online learning courses. He regularly attends ALA conferences, meetings, and workshops, and has presented numerous times. He serves as President on the Board of Trustees for his local public library.