Robin Jephthah.
Researcher Designer Educator
I'm a learning scientist studying how people collaborate, and how multimodal data and large language models can help us teach better. Recently of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; presently of Radicality Ministries.
I work at the seam between research, design, and teaching. The throughline is simple: I study how people learn together, and how the artifacts we build — cameras, tools, language models, lesson plans — change what's possible in a classroom.
My doctoral work, completed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, ranked the multimodal features — speech, gesture, gaze, position — that most reliably reveal whether a small group of engineering undergraduates is actually collaborating, or merely sitting near one another. The dissertation lives at the intersection of learning sciences, machine learning, and a very mundane question: what does a good group look like?
Outside the academy I write curriculum, design devotional workbooks, and translate long-form video and books with an LLM-plus-human-in-the-loop pipeline that I keep refining. The brand of all of it is the same handwritten signature.