Impact Spotlight: Matt Wilkins
Posted On: 04-02-2021
Posted In: Impact Spotlight, News,
Learn About This ARIS Impact Goals Award Winner
I am a biologist who has spent 13 years conducting research and the last 3.5 years teaching and developing curriculum in Nashville middle schools. From my dual experiences as a working scientist, and a teacher embedded in a public school five days a week, I became incredibly frustrated with the lack of infrastructure connecting scientists motivated to do outreach with students and teachers hungry for access to new discoveries and real-world applications. This frustration inspired me to start my own education studio, Galactic Polymath, to facilitate the mobilization of knowledge from Academia into classrooms.
For more than a year, I have been building a publishing workflow, along with a proof-of-concept lesson based on my own research that demonstrates a new vision for what education outreach can be. Our lessons are truly interdisciplinary (aligned to standards in ELA, math, science, and social studies), they can be taught by a non-specialist with minimal prep time, and they are ready to be taught either in-person or remotely.
At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the inequities of an education system funded through content subscriptions, we produce open-access lessons for all that are funded on the production side, to meet the outreach goals of clients. By creating a for-contract education studio, I hope to relieve the heavy-lifting of translating research for the formal classroom, while also achieving much greater impact, and working to increase equal access to high-quality education materials.
We want to empower both students and teachers with an ambitious vision for education: Think bigger. Learn everything.
Matt Wilkins, PhD
Founder, CEO of Galactic Polymath
2020 ARIS Impact Goals Award Winner