Mission
Praxis Mission: To democratize access to skills, resources, and AI for the purpose of solving some of the world’s toughest challenges.
You Can Become a Change Agent for Good
One of nature’s greatest examples of positive change is the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. Together, we can collaborate to end cancer, grow the food supply, and improve climate resilience
Praxis is the Catalyst for Personal Metamorphosis
The Praxis AI LXP and Pria AI Mentor combine to create a digital cocoon where you can nurture your new skills, participate in meaningful research, and earn credentials.
Change Begins with You
It is time for you to learn, apply, validate, discover, and earn to become the best version of yourself! If not now … when?
Transform Yourself. Change the World!
Values
Praxis AI solutions accomplish sustained personal and global change by empowering underserved students (HBCU and AIHEC, for example) with experiential online science education and data-intensive research. At the heart of the programs are digital credentials, employment assistance, and the popular BioHackers podcast.
Praxis AI is an award-winning digital education & research company dedicated to solving many of the world’s toughest problems, including climate change, inequality in education, cancer, hunger, cultural resilience, and global digital transformation. In 2022, Praxis AI won three Stevie AwardsTM including Startup of the Year, Educator of the Year (Alex Feltus), and the nation’s best hackathon for the Meharry Paseman Cancer BioHackathon.
Founded in 2019, Praxis AI has revolutionized learning at several U.S. universities, built a virtual institute for indigenous health research, designed a Digital Learning standard for the International Standards Organization (ISO), educated thousands of students, and hosted several cancer BioHackathons.
From a technology perspective, Praxis AI pioneered the application and integration of AI and machine learning into a single, cohesive educational experience, including curation, assessment, mentoring, hands-on labs, research, and workforce enablement. In addition, the company has incorporated cloud-based supercomputing, asynchronous learning journeys, synchronous virtual classrooms, and social collaboration for the purpose of skilling, research, and workforce development.
From an operations perspective, the self-funded Praxis AI team comprises ed tech innovators, world-class engineers, and award-winning professors while connecting education institutions, government agencies (NSF and NIH), and employers with cohorts of underserved, amazing, smart students. The Praxis AI-powered Learning Experience Platform (LXP) is hosted in a highly secure, global cloud.
Praxis AI is a sustainable, mission-driven, technology and service organization.
Meet the Team
David James Clarke IV
President and CEO
My entire career has been dedicated to the magic that occurs when you connect students, teachers, and content. As an EdTech veteran, I have been mostly focused on platforms, methodologies, and new ways to present and assess content.
But I have never seen a technology as transformative and powerful as generative AI.
As President & CEO of Praxis AI, I lead a world-class team of ed tech innovators, talented engineers, and award-winning professors in a mission to connect education institutions, nonprofit stakeholders (NSF and NIH), and employers with cohorts of underserved, amazing, smart students (aka, BioHackers).
I am so excited to get up every day to pour my passion, skills, and energy into this amazing company: to empower students, to facilitate faculty, and to supercharge content. Along with Hugo, I helped design and build the Praxis AI LXP. Along with Hugo and Reed, I contributed to the creation of our generative AI mentor (“Pria”).
During my career, I have been fortunate enough to work on numerous projects that have helped some of the world’s largest companies and learning institutions achieve measurable results using innovative digital learning products and the Praxis LXP platform. I have written a few best selling books, patented some stuff, filmed a bunch of podcasts, and earned a couple degrees from University of California, Berkeley, and California Polytechnic State University.
The Future is Bright!
Alex Feltus, Ph.D.
Co-Founder & Chief Scientist
Alex is a world-renowned professor and researcher in artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, cyberinfrastructure, high-performance computing, network biology, tumor biology, agrigenomics, genome assembly, systems genetics, paleogenomics, and bioenergy feedstock genetics. As Chief Science Officer of Praxis AI, he runs the Praxis Open Discovery (POD) labs and drives product innovation, data-intensive computing research, and biohackathons.
Alex received a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from Auburn University in 1992, served two years in the Peace Corps in the Fiji Islands, and then completed advanced training in biomedical sciences at Vanderbilt and Emory. Currently, Feltus is Professor in Clemson University’s Dept. of Genetics & Biochemistry.
Feltus has published over one-hundred scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, released open-source software, and taught undergrad and PhD students in bioinformatics, biochemistry, and genetics. Alex’s work has been cited over 10,000 times. He is funded by multiple NSF grants and is engaged in tethering together extremely smart people from diverse technical backgrounds to propel genomics research from the Excel-scale into the Exascale.
Hugo Lebegue
VP of Engineering
I have a dream that one day, education will be made accessible for all! Regardless of level of income or proximity to schools. At Praxis AI, we bring this dream closer to reality by enabling students, faculty, and staff to deliver learning to the edge, in a pragmatic and personalized way.
Hi, my name is Hugo Lebegue, and I am the Vice President of Engineering for Praxis AI.
I bring 25 years of experience running so`ware engineering teams to this cool company. I am a two-time inventor of patented solutions in Healthcare, Finance and Education. My passion is to engineer cutting edge technology solutions, combining AI, e-Commerce and learning management systems – such as our Praxis LXP (learning experience platform).
I get a sense of pride in a job well done, and knowing that at the end of each day, someone else’s life got a little bit better because of my actions – or problems I helped them solve. I am proud that Praxis is an agile company with altruistic endeavors.
Together, we are at the forefront of the AI revolution, and my dream is to scale the deployment of our solutions to increase funding for engineering so we can grow the company to reach under-served populations in the education space across the globe.
Thank you!
Brian Boyd
VP of Customer
After an extensive career in sales, sales management, and services at companies like Oracle, KPMG Consulting and others, I am excited to embrace a broader role at Praxis AI where I can help ensure that we deliver solutions that institutions, professors and students absolutely cannot live without. As Vice President of Customer, I oversee customer acquisition and evaluations, onboarding and support.
Since joining Praxis AI, I’ve been blown away by the product and the applications for it. While I’ve enjoyed my time “drinking from the firehose” that is AI, it has become clear to me that AI in education levels the playing field in some significant and exciting ways.
Many under-served students are left with only search engines or email messages to instructors in the middle of the night. By giving these students access to a generative AI mentor like Pria, we are empowering them with the opportunity to ask questions — sometimes complex class specific questions – and receive curated, contextually relevant help instantly 24 hours a day. Take this scenario and multiply it by several concurrent courses and it’s not hard to see that it can be the difference between completing a degree or making the heartbreaking decision to drop out.
I see educators working every day to bring students into higher education with scholarships and scaffolded programs. But once in, students struggle juggling real world issues and education. Unfortunately, education is always the one that moves to the back burner. In my career, I have worked cross-functionally at an executive level with all the various constituencies in a tech company and I understand how to advocate for customers whether it’s product or process related. Satisfied customers are fine… but raving fans are what we live for at Praxis AI!
Ian Hendershot
Director of Learning Solutions
Ian leads the Praxis AI Learning Solutions team.
At Praxis AI, we treat Learning Solutions as a critical three-legged chair in regard to responsibilities. The three legs represent sales, project management, and instructional design. Ian is a very busy, and super positive, team member as he manages the relationships with Higher Education institutions and publishers, collaborates on course design, authors course development, manages client project communications and expectations, and provides client feedback to the product development team.
Ian is an innovative and creative EdTech professional with nearly 20 years of experience in instructional design and the delivery of training content and learning programs that engage and develop high-performing personnel who are fully capable of meeting, and exceeding, their work requirements.
He offers solid expertise in leading learning program implementations and partnerships using sound instructional design principles, engaging content development with cross-functional teams, and most recently a focus on upskilling/reskilling and go-to-market onboarding.
We are very excited to have Ian in our Praxis AI family.
