Mike Gelbart is the Co-Founder and Principal of the Vancouver Independent School for Science and Technology (VISST), a not-for-profit STEM high school. He was born and raised in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. As an undergraduate student at Princeton University, he studied physics and worked on research projects in biophysics. In graduate school he switched fields to computer science and received his PhD from the machine learning group at Harvard University. After graduate school he joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia as an education-focused faculty member. At UBC he was part of the team that created UBC’s Master of Data Science Program, where he taught courses and also served as Co-Director from 2018 to 2021. He is currently Principal of the Vancouver Independent School for Science and Technology (VISST), a STEM high school that he co-founded in 2022.

For a non-exhaustive list of things that didn’t work out along the way, see his CV of Failures.