Our team

As the president of Highlights Education, which includes Zaner-Bloser and Stenhouse, Lisa Carmona is active in professional communities related to educational research, literacy, and digital learning, including the Westerville Library Foundation Board and NSF research grant advisory boards.

A high-energy leader with more than two decades of success in educational publishing and technology, she has served in senior leadership roles at McGraw-Hill Education, Frank Schaffer Publications, and School Zone Publishing.

Lisa holds an MBA from Ohio University and a BA from Central Michigan University.

Barbara Chow serves as the education program director at the Heising-Simons Foundation.

Her early years of service were spent working for the Senate Democratic Policy Committee and the Senate Budget Committee, followed by the Clinton Administration, where she was deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council; associate director for education, income maintenance, and labor programs at the Office of Management and Budget; and special assistant to the president for White House Legislative Affairs.

Barbara went on to serve as the House Budget Committee policy director and the executive director of the National Geographic Education Foundation. She also spent eight years as the education program director for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Barbara holds an MA in Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in Government from Pomona College. In addition to serving on the board of Illustrative Mathematics, Chow is also on the boards of the Learning Policy Institute, the National Public Education Support Fund, and PBLWorks.

Heather Hill studies policies and programs designed to improve mathematics teacher and teaching quality at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Her recent research focuses on teacher professional development, instructional coaching, teacher evaluation, changes over time in teachers’ mathematical knowledge and instructional quality in mathematics, and teacher experiences and characteristics that lead to high-quality instruction and stronger student outcomes.

Heather and her team have developed assessments that capture teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching and teachers’ mathematical quality of instruction, assessments now widely available to researchers, instructional coaches, evaluators, and policymakers via online training and administrative systems.

Heather is a fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and serves on the AERA grants board. She also serves on the editorial boards of several journals, and as an advisor to numerous research projects and policy efforts in the US and abroad. She is coauthor of Learning Policy: When State Education Reform Works with David K. Cohen (Yale University Press, 2001).

Heather holds a PhD from the University of Michigan and a BA from Swarthmore College.

Dr. Kristin Umland is a mathematician, educator, and visionary leader committed to transforming how students experience math. As CEO and cofounder of Illustrative Mathematics, she leads the organization’s vision to help all learners know, use, and enjoy mathematics.

Formerly mathematics faculty at the University of New Mexico, Kristin spent over two decades teaching math, leading K–12 initiatives, and researching how students learn. Since cofounding IM, she has served as vice president of content development, chief product officer, and president—roles through which she helped shape IM’s curricula and professional learning.

Together with fellow cofounder Bill McCallum, she has helped grow IM from a university-based project into a nationally-recognized nonprofit serving millions of students and hundreds of thousands of teachers. A recipient of the AMS Award for Impact on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics and the Louise Hay Award from the Association for Women in Mathematics, Kristin remains a tireless advocate for helping all students see themselves as mathematicians.

George Zettler is a mathematician and financial manager. He is a cofounder and managing member of Flowing Shape Advisers, LLC, a consulting group specializing in mathematical analysis.

Prior to Flowing Shape, Zettler cofounded Ellington Management Group LLC and held a position at Kidder Peabody. George also served as a professor of mathematics at Columbia University for nine years, where he conducted original research in representation theory and algebraic geometry.

He holds a PhD and an AB in Mathematics from the University of Maryland and Harvard University.