Born and raised in Houston, Texas, Elaine thought she wanted to be a lawyer until her senior year at Baylor University. Internships at the US Department of Justice and State of Texas helped her realize that her passion was in public policy rather than governance. She joined Teach For America and taught pre-k for two years before being recruited to join the founding team at KIPP Legacy in northeast Houston. There, she taught for a couple years before becoming Dean of the Lower School.

As an administrator, Elaine led her school’s adoption of a blended learning model, integrating personalized digital instruction across all grade levels. Passionate about data-driven decision making, she aggregated multiple sources of raw student performance data, all collected in differing methods. While being, in essence, a human API for two years, she grew frustrated by traditional spreadsheet application’s ability to control input and taught herself SQL, not knowing this would be her first step down the road to software engineering.

A Holberton School alum, Elaine loves podcasts and improving her StarCraft 2 strategy.