Author Bio
• Katie O’Brien
A native New Englander, Katie graduated first in her class from Pinkerton Academy, a New Hampshire regional public school of 3200 students, nestled in the most Norman Rockwell-y part of small-town America that you can imagine. She arrived at Harvard College in the fall of 2000 and majored in English and American Literature and Language, ultimately graduating magna cum laude.
At Harvard, she also co-directed CityStep—a program that integrates arts education into the Cambridge public middle schools—and after graduating and moving to New York, she continued that work with high schoolers in NYC, Oxford, London, and Edinburgh. During this time, Katie also teamed up with Hunter and two other Harvard classmates to form Overqualified Tutoring, a NYC- and LA-based educational services company. She has spent thousands of hours tutoring and home-schooling students of all ages, and in all subject areas. Katie currently resides in Los Angeles…but still roots for the Red Sox from afar.
• Hunter Maats
Hunter isn’t really a native of anywhere. Born in Saudi Arabia, he’d lived in Brazil, Greece and New York before his family moved to England when he was eight years old. There he attended Eton College, England’s most stodgy and prestigious all-boys boarding school. After high school, he pursued his love of science by spending a year doing tumor virus research at Cold Spring Harbor laboratory, where he lived in the basement of the home of James Watson, Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of the double helical structure of DNA.
It was a no-brainer for Hunter to major in Biochemistry when he enrolled at Harvard College in the fall of 2000. While at Harvard, Hunter devoted his spare time and his electives to a mixture of pranks and foreign languages. Occasionally, he mixed the two. After graduating, Hunter moved to Los Angeles and helped to found Overqualified Tutoring. A current owner of comically overstuffed bookshelves, Hunter has enjoyed tackling the one aspect of science that he has always found unsettling: the gap between the research that exists and the public’s knowledge.
Today, Hunter spends his time finding more and more ways to bring those two together. When he’s away from the aforementioned bookshelves, Hunter can be found at cross-fit, eating Nicole’s food, or dreaming of Kansas City. (From the authors' website.)