About
Teaching on OpenClassrooms
I studied art and architecture at Brown University, an Ivy League school in the United States, and earned my bachelor’s degree there. I then earned a business degree at Sotheby’s.
I started exploring tech while writing my business master's thesis, which was on the intersection of arts, funding platforms, and technology. That’s when I started working at Kickstarter with artists and makers. Every day, I saw people fulfilling their creative dreams thanks to the platform, but I was so frustrated by not knowing how the website actually worked behind the scenes! I filled my nights and weekends with learning to code. I dove into coding so fervently that I eventually moved to the Kickstarter engineering team full-time. You can read more about this transition from the arts to coding in this interview. I also launched the GitHub for Poets program to help others do the same.
Coaching at Rails Girls in Helsinki
At Kickstarter, I developed a passion for translation and international experiences online. For a company Hack Day, I even built a French version of Kickstarter called Kicksartre. This was a sign of French things to come!
After Kickstarter, I wrote Ruby code for Blue Bottle ("the Apple of coffee") in the Bay Area. I worked on cool projects like internationalization and site redesigns and enjoyed exploring San Francisco and Oakland.
Meeting French president François Hollande in 2016 during his presidential term
I then moved to Paris, France in 2014, where I've taught more than 200,000 people how to code and design in English and French at OpenClassrooms, Europe's largest online education platform. I'm also the former director of Women Who Code Paris and have spoken at various meetups and at Google about education and technology. You can read about my life as a teacher in this Le Monde article (in French) or in my Medium post (in English). I’ve also worked with Criteo, Qonto, and the Ministère de l’Intérieur (notably on refugies.info, an MVP that was part of Entrepreneurs d’Intérêt Général and formally adopted by the government).
I now work at Assistance Publique - Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP), the colossal Paris public hospital system that’s also a European world-renowned medical university institution. I work on the Entrepôt de Données de Santé and the clinical research and artificial intelligence that stems from it.
Speaking at Google
Outside of work, I love running, being outdoors, dancing, drawing, cooking tasty food, writing nice cards and letters, hanging with my cool family, and reading one book per week.
I also passed the CAP Pâtissier, the national French pastry diploma, in 2020 to lend some legitimacy to my pastry-making side hobby.
Let me know how you think we should work together!
“Emily est une personne brillante, dotée à la fois de capacités créatives, d’écoute et d’analyse. J’ai été amené à recruter plus de 100 personnes pour OpenClassrooms depuis sa création en 2007, et je peux confirmer que la combinaison de ces compétences est très rare chez une personne. Ses compétences, tant techniques qu’humaines, ne font aucunement débat au sein de notre société.”
“Emily is a resourceful, creative, and empathetic engineer, and an all-around great human being to work with. Her work is always grounded in solving clear problems experienced by people, whether that’s an internal tool to help her co-workers, or a user-facing tweak to ease a frustrating workflow. She also has a passion for education and demystifying software development. As a manager, it’s hard to ask for more.”
“Emily understands complex problems and always brings great solutions to the table. She’s open-minded and embraces the Agile way of doing things. Additionally, she’s enthusiastic, motivated, and great to be around. She’s a hard worker, learns quickly, and is skilled in many areas, whether she’s working on them directly or helping others learn. Emily is definitely the kind of person that you want in your team.”
“J’ai eu la chance de collaborer avec Emily pour l’outillage pédagogique du service Réfugiés.info. Emily a su nous guider avec bienveillance et brillance pour trouver les meilleures solutions ainsi que concevoir et produire avec célérité. C’est une des rares personnes que j’aimerais avoir comme manager : elle est capable de mettre en confiance et de motiver les troupes avec un enthousiasme éclatant !”
“Emily was of great help and inspiration to me. Working in highly engaged teams is great - if your team members are truly on the same motivational, personal and team-oriented ethic as you are - which describes what working with Emily is like. She is smart and gets things done but her most rare trait is that ability to make an entire team feel her enthusiasm to achieve a common mission together.”
“Emily is an incredibly smart person. She’s able to manage teams, build products, write content, produce videos, train teams and present ideas in a very entertaining manner. Her ability to speak French and English perfectly is a strong asset. I would recommend her 100%.”