Our instructors

Eric Mazzi

Eric Mazzi, BSc, MSc, PhD, is Principal at Mazzi Consulting and Adjunct Professor at New York Institute of Technology—Vancouver.

He is a consultant and educator specializing in technology and policy for industrial and commercial energy systems. He provides analysis, measurement and verification, policy studies and education to reduce energy use and emissions while promoting energy equity. He has taught university and certification courses, and served five years on engineering faculty at UBC. He is lead editor and co-author of the forthcoming 9th edition of the Guide to Energy Management.

Lawrence McDaniel

Lawrence McDaniel, BSc, is the Chief Technology Officer at Querium Corporation, an edtech company specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Computing for educational institutions. He is the principal author and lead product engineer of Smarter by Querium™, an AI resource orchestration platform designed to teach generative AI to non-programmers.

Lawrence brings extensive experience in financial modelling, forecasting systems, analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, web, database technology and cloud infrastructure. He is a veteran of the hedge fund industry and multiple startups and early-stage ventures with dozens of successful product launches and one NASDAQ IPO under his belt.

He publishes regularly on advances in web technologies and open source platforms, and is the principal maintainer of openedx-actions, a set of CI-CD tools for scaling Open edX on Kubernetes. Learn more about Lawrence here.

Christopher McLeod

Daria Melnik

Paula Moriarity

Leigh Morrow

Leigh Morrow is a former television investigative reporter (CBC, Global, City TV) who covered local and international stories in Canada, the United States and Vietnam. With a degree in journalism and more than three decades in broadcast journalism, she loved telling people’s stories and digging deep for many award-winning investigative pieces. From her experiences, she co-wrote a memoir for women in their middle years, Just Push Play – on Midlife. In 2017, she became certified by the Birren Center for Autobiographical Studies in California to teach and train others in the Guided Autobiography method. Leigh teaches Guided Autobiography level 1 and 2, and a number of courses on creative aging, including The Wisdom Years: Aging with Purpose and Creativity. Learn about Leigh’s studio where she writes and creates on her website.

Shahriyar Motahari

Shahriyar Motahari is a PhD student in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at UBC, specializing in developing innovative technologies for the removal of emerging contaminants from water. Shahriyar also has a background in tutoring high school students, reflecting his passion for teaching and mentorship.

Soroush Nasseri

Dr. S. Soroush Nasseri is a biomedical engineer and researcher at the UBC School of Biomedical Engineering. Soroush's research focused on developing tools for the application of 3-D cell cultures for development and discovery of novel drugs.

Liza Navarro

Justin Newell

Justin Newell, art historian and artist, has lectured extensively on Western Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1300-1963, the Bible in Western Art, and the Greek Myths in Art. His lectures have been offered at UBC and local colleges, as well as aboard Elite Cruise Ships, where he is recognized as one of their top special interest speakers. He also conducts art history tours to Venice, Florence, Rome, Paris, London, and other art centres of the world, weaving his knowledge of history, art, political events, and famous sights into his presentations.