”The Leonhard Center presents Penn State with a special opportunity to initiate and support vital innovations within the engineering curriculum. The Center is uniquely positioned to bring together a diverse group students, faculty, alumni, and industrial representatives to develop new approaches to education that better prepare graduates for professional practice in the world of global commerce.”

Andrew J. Milne

CEO
Tidebreak, Inc.

Andrew Milne is co-Founder and CEO of Tidebreak, Inc., a Silicon Valley company that is revolutionizing the worlds of work and of learning by delivering interactive workplace technologies to support team collaboration and interactive learning. His career has blended interests in creative design, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

Andrew’s expertise lies at the intersection of collaborative work practice, information technology, and interactive workspace design. He has been an educational innovator for nearly two decades, alternately as teacher, researcher, technologist, and consultant. He is an active contributor to the national discourse on learning space design and related interaction technologies, having authored journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers on various issues relevant to higher education. He has also delivered several keynote addresses and invited presentations, most recently on the topic of “The Interaction Age.”

Startup situations are very familiar for Dr. Milne. As a graduate student at Penn State, he took an active role in launching the Leonhard Center by founding the Envisioneering program, leading some of the Center’s early projects, and ultimately serving as the Assistant Director. On completing his Master’s program, Milne joined an Alexandria, VA startup firm, INTEGREX Systems Corporation. As one of the firm’s first 10 employees, he helped identify and exploit market opportunities, ultimately establishing a new Technology Planning Practice in response to a market need he perceived.

In 1997 Andrew left to pursue his Ph.D. at Stanford University, where he again found himself helping launch a center for educational innovation, this time the Stanford Learning Lab. There he served as the project leader for research in technology-augmented learning environments, a manager and designer of technology-augmented classrooms, and a project manager for curriculum deployment efforts. While at Stanford, he established and maintained a private consulting practice, Quadrature Design Group.

In his work at Tidebreak, he brings his experience to bear on the challenges Tidebreak’s customers, and indeed many academic institutions, face.

Andrew Milne earned his B.S. Mechanical Engineering (Honors) and M.S. Electrical Engineering from Penn State, studying for a year at the University of St. Andrew’s (Scotland) as part of his undergraduate program. He received the College of Engineering’s Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant award in 1991. At Penn State he was a University Scholar and a Lion Ambassador, among other organizations. Dr. Milne earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University at the Center for Design Research in the School of Engineering, where his research focused on developing and evaluating pervasive computing collaboration technologies to support distributed engineering design teams.