Our instructors

Marjan Mahmoudi

Marjan Mahmoudi, PhD, has been a Farsi and French as a second language teacher and translator for more than 20 years. She has lived in Iran, France and Canada, and has taught at Conseil scolaire francophone (CSF) in Vancouver, and at a variety of private schools and colleges.

Jesse Malakoe

Ihar Maslenikau

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.

Stacey Matson

Stacey Matson is a children’s and young adult author, creative writing instructor and manuscript consultant based in Vancouver, BC. She has served as Writer in Residence for the Saskatoon Public Library (2025–2026) and as the Writer’s Trust Berton House writer-in-residence in Dawson City, Yukon (2016). Stacey supports writers of all ages in developing their craft through her teaching with the Creative Writing for Children Society and her work as a manuscript consultant for Simon Fraser University. She is also a member of the Moon Jelly Arts Collective, a multidisciplinary group of artists delivering immersive arts programming in schools across BC. 

Stacey has published five novels with Scholastic Canada, including Eleven Out of Ten and Finding Cooper. Her first book, A Year in the Life of a Total and Complete Genius, was a Junior Library Guild Selection and won the Chocolate Lily award.  

Joshua Mattson

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

Emily Meier

Daria Melnik

Mona Mendel

Ella Meyer

Mobina Mobaraki

Mobina Mobaraki, PhD, MSc, is Co-Founder and CTO of an AI mental health startup and an AI and Python programming instructor. She is a PhD-trained AI researcher, entrepreneur and educator and has conducted applied research with Google’s XR team, contributing to world-class R&D in extended reality and machine learning.

At her startup, an AI-powered wellness platform, Mobina has led the product from concept to paying clients and secured non-dilutive funding through Mitacs, gaining acceptance into the NextAI accelerator. She has coached and instructed professionals and students in AI, Python programming, performance strategies and technology adoption, bringing technical expertise to responsible AI use and decision-making.

Mobina is passionate about empowering practitioners and businesses to work effectively with AI systems and she has published several articles including Masked Face Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Similarity Analysis.

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.

Ulysses Mugavazi

Ulysses Mugavazi is a Zimbabwean writer living on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ land. He was a recipient of the Mozilla Foundation’s 2023 Creative Media Awards, a keynote speaker at the Science Fiction Foundation’s 2024 Annual Conference, and a McCormack Writing Center Winter Online 2026 nonfiction scholar. He graduated from UBCs MFA in Creative Writing in 2025. His work has appeared in Level Ground’s SKEW and was shortlisted for the Malahat Review’s Open Season Awards.

Meet Ulysses Mugavazi.

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