Kimberly Foerster, Founder & CEO, was inspired to found CharacTour in part due to her experience as a Managing Director at a private equity firm where she was on the board of a publishing company. Early in her career, Kim worked in the investment banking division of Goldman Sachs and the strategic planning group of PepsiCo. Kim received her MBA from Kellogg and her BA in English from Rice University.
Mark Nie, Data Scientist, graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in Economics with minors in Statistics and Computer Science. He's worked as a data scientist at the University of Chicago and has been involved in CharacTour's efforts with our natural language processing technology.
The Team
Chicago-based CharacTour is a small team with big plans.
Whit Nelson, Head of Technology, is a developer and serial entrepreneur with a passion for building software. His prior experience includes serving as the Head of Technology for The Riveter, a venture-backed national network of community and coworking spaces. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. In the arts community, he is a writer, actor, and comedian.
Learn More About CharacTour
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At a party, I'm...
the center of attention
meeting some new people
chilling with my friends
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CharacTour is grateful to everyone who has helped us get to where we are today, including Co-Founder Pete McEntegart, Sarah Corey, Dan Unger, and Catherine Giayvia.
Thurston Nabe, Lead Developer, has over two decades in the software industry as a multilingual engineer, architect and executive. Some of his areas of specialty are concurrency and memory models, distributed systems, and data science. Thurston is a passionate advocate of the principle that beauty is the art of simplicity.
Will Garrison, Senior Developer, is a multimedia developer and artist. His passions range from musical composition to constraint-based generative visual and auditory art to system architecture design and principles. He wears many hats, with positions including UX designer and consultant, composer, producer, and senior software engineer.
Sherry (Ruiting) Zha, Data Scientist, earned her MS in Analytics from the University of Chicago and has previous experience in product marketing and teaching. At CharacTour, Sherry focuses on natural language processing, recommendation systems, and user behavior analysis.