Ariel Paul
Cofounder at PhET Interactive Simulations, University of Colorado Boulder
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolAriel Paul is a physicist-turned-educational entrepreneur and cofounder with 11 years of experience designing scientific instruments, curricula, and interactive learning tools from Boulder, Colorado. He has led development teams and managed PhET’s simulation design and outreach, blending hands-on instrument fabrication with user-centered educational design. His work spans academia, research labs (including pioneering tabletop EUV imaging and quasi-phase matching), and K–university teaching, showing a rare ability to move ideas from prototype shop to classroom adoption. Ariel combines intellectual curiosity with practical craftsmanship—having supervised machine shops, mentored students, and created novel lab apparatus—so his products are both scientifically rigorous and pedagogically effective. Currently he builds learning experiences and cooling-tech ventures that aim to make complex science and math intuitive for students and educators alike.
11 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Physics, PhD, Physics at University of Colorado BoulderLAWRENCE HIGH SCHOOLBA, Physics; Physics, BA, Physics; Physics at University of Pennsylvania
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (35)
simulation9
homescreen8
simulations8
quality-assurance8
scene-graph7
navigationbar7
functionbuilder7
html7
azerothcore6
base646
metadata6
curve-fitting4
hpc-applications4
html-document4
type-coercion4
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
phetsims/phet-cafepress
Jul 2015 - Jul 2017
Contributions:1 comment, 3 issues in 2 years
phetsims/tasks
Jan 2015 - Jul 2023
General tasks for PhET that will be tracked on Github
Contributions:3 pushes, 1281 comments, 399 issues in 8 years 8 months
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