Our Instructors

Siliang Liu

Connie Lo

Nathan Lockhart

Nathan Lockhart, MA, CEC, is a learning professional and certified executive coach with more than 20 years of experience. He specializes in the design and delivery of experiential training both in live, virtual classes and in online self-guided courses. He also provides one-on-one coaching to executives on topics related to leadership, communication, and negotiations.

A former employee of Health Canada and the Privy Council Office, Nathan’s knowledge spans a number of disciplines, including public policy development, negotiation, issues management, and strategic communications. He’s a dynamic public speaker with a strong understanding of workplace challenges and demands facing professionals and has delivered more than 500 workshops to organizations in the private, non-government, and government sectors.

Jenny Lu

Moussa Magassa

Dr. Moussa Magassa, PhD, is Principal Strategist, Community Engagement, EDI and Anti-Racism Education at the University of Victoria where he works to enhance understanding of the university’s human rights, equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism education goals, community engagement and participation. He’s also an associate faculty for the Diploma in Social Justice at UVic and for the Royal Roads University Master in Global Leadership. He also teaches as an instructor for the Diploma in Intercultural Studies programs at UVic.

Moussa has extensive experience researching, designing and facilitating training, courses and workshops in anti-racism awareness and intervention training, intercultural competency development, intercultural conflict resolution, human rights discrimination and harassment, social justice, anti-oppression education, and immigrant and refugee integration. Born in Senegal, and conversant in a number of languages, Moussa is an advisor to various organizations, including Resilience BC and Simon Fraser University’s Migrant Systems Change Leadership Certificate program. He has also served on several boards, including those of the Francophone Federation of BC, the Francophone Society of Victoria and as co-chair of the Greater Victoria Police Diversity Advisory Committee.

In addition to holding a PhD in curriculum and instruction with a special focus on critical race theory, anti-racism, Islamophobia and human rights, Moussa also holds a Master of Arts in Human Security and Peacebuilding, along with several credentials in conflict resolution, peace studies, forced migration and refugee studies, and humanitarian law. He is a qualified administrator of the intercultural competence assessment tool.

Jesse Malakoe

Rob Mathison

Rob Mathison has over 20 years of experience as a writer, content creator, and content strategist. After starting out as a print newspaper and magazine journalist in the UK, he moved into custom publishing, now known as content marketing. This led him to Toronto and Redwood Custom Communications (now Totem), the North American leader in custom publishing and brand journalism. He started offering writing and content strategy services, and in-house web writer training, through his own company in 2006. Clients past and present include Best Buy, Royal Bank of Scotland, Hootsuite, UBC, Government of Alberta, SFU, Fraser Health, Blast Radius, FCV, and Engine Digital.

Find Rob at www.robmathison.com and www.tincancommunications.com, and on Twitter at @tincancomms.

Lawrence McDaniel

Lawrence McDaniel, BSc, is a freelance full-stack web developer and business analyst, as well as an angel investor, entrepreneur and mentor. He has worked as a freelance technology consultant since 1999, and has advised dozens of startups as well as international banks, hedge funds and real estate investment funds.

Lawrence has years of experience designing high availability, horizontally scalable cloud-based infrastructure environments, and 20+ years’ experience designing transactional database systems. His areas of expertise include financial modelling and forecasting systems, analytics, machine learning, big data, web, mobile, database technology and Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure. He has significant experience with classic backend stacks and front-end frameworks including Django, React, Angular, and WordPress. He also works extensively with the Open edX® learning management system.

Lawrence is an ambassador for the AWS Activate Program in Mexico, and advises companies on migration plans to AWS. He also works with early-stage ventures creating back-end environments and implementing continuous integration strategies.

For 25 years, Lawrence lived in Mexico, Western Europe and Southeast Asia. He holds a Bachelor of Science from University of North Texas with majors in computer science and mathematics, and minors in physics and English.

Christopher McLeod

Lucia Nogacz

Lucia Helena Kouten Nogacz, MA, has close to 30 years’ experience teaching Portuguese language, literature and writing to learners of all ages in Brazil and Canada.

After earning her master’s degree in Portuguese language and literature, Lucia worked as a teacher and pedagogic programs coordinator at elementary and high schools in Brazil. She was also a pedagogic director at a preschool in Curitiba where she developed bilingual Portuguese-English projects.

In Canada, Lucia has worked as a language instructor at Berlitz Canada since 2010, and is accredited in Practical Teaching Techniques in speaking, listening, reading and writing from the same institution. She has taught several levels of Brazilian Portuguese classes to various ages and has prepared students for the Portuguese Language Proficiency Test (CELPE-BRAS). Lucia also has experience revising, translating and proofreading books and scholarly materials from Spanish and English to Portuguese.

Lucia was born in Curitiba, Brazil, and moved to Vancouver more than a decade ago. She reads books of a variety of genres daily, and has a passion for learning about Portuguese and English literature and languages.