Our Team
Brord and Will, co-founders of Pangea Chat, working in “some cafe” in Barcelona
What’s Pangea Chat’s story?
Pangea Chat began in 2017 when Will Jordan-Cooley moved to Barcelona seeking adventure and suddenly had a personal need to learn Spanish. As an instructional designer and technologist, he was disappointed with available methods of language learning which forced him to learn first and communicate later. With natural language processing rapidly progressing and his background creating experiential learning, he envisioned a tool which could both enable a beginner’s conversations and guide them to proficiency.
Since then, the Pangea Chat team has grown to an all-star team of designers, developers, researchers and entrepreneurs. We have been designing, testing and iterating around the core concept of learning a language while texting with friends. We are driven by the belief that we can use AI and game design to connect the world across language barriers.
Will Jordan-Cooley (he/him)
Founder & CEO
Masters in Instructional Technology and Media from Teachers College Columbia University and graduate work on NSF-funded climate change education. 10 years in Edtech designing educational experiences for industry leaders like BrainPOP, Nickelodeon, and Discovery Education. Created and led the design consultancy, Learn Play Games. Strong technical background with a bachelor’s in Applied Mathematics from William and Mary, published work in theoretical biology, and 5+ years experience developing games and mobile applications
Paige Poole (she/her)
Head of Product
Paige received a Master’s in TESOL Studies from the University of Leeds and has 17+ years as a language educator, researcher, and administrator in the US, England, Colombia, and Brazil. She has worked with a variety of learners including K-12 and university-level students, refugees, and adults. Her primary areas of research have been CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), internationalization at home, and project-based learning.
Jordan Myers (they/them)
ML/NLP Researcher
Jordan is a graduate student in the University of Arizona’s Human Language Technology M.S program, studying natural language processing, machine learning, and computational linguistics. They got their bachelor’s degree in Language Science from the University of California, Irvine. They are interested in bridging the gap between natural language processing and natural language understanding, developing resources for low resource languages, and utilizing AI to create accessibility tools.
Daniel Isbell, PhD (he/him)
Language Learning and Assessment Advisor
Isbell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is a language tester, applied linguist and teacher. His primary areas of research are language assessment and instructed second language acquisition, and developing a richer interface between the two.
Katharina Kann, PhD (she/her)
NLP Advisor
Dr. Kann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Colorado Boulder and an expert in natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning. Her research is centered around three main areas: 1) NLP for domains with limited data, such as the medical or educational domain, 2) multilingual NLP with a focus on the needs of low-resource languages and transfer learning techniques, and 3) language grounding.
Brord Van Wierst (he/him)
Software Engineer
Brord is a software engineer with experience in frontend game and mobile development as well as backend experimental database and authentication methods.