From Homeschooler to MIT Professor

From Homeschooler to MIT Professor
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Kerry McDonald
Updated:
Matthew Shoulders grew up in the Appalachian Mountains on a small Virginia farm where he and his five siblings were homeschooled. His father was an accounting professor at Virginia Tech, and his grandfather was a chemistry professor, inspiring Matt’s interest in the subject to which he would dedicate his career.
Matt attended Virginia Tech as an undergraduate, then earned a PhD at the University of Wisconsin, and got a job offer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2012, where he is now a tenured professor of chemistry studying cellular protein folding.
Kerry McDonald
Kerry McDonald
Author
Kerry McDonald is a senior education fellow at FEE and host of the weekly LiberatED podcast. She is also the author of “Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom” (2019) and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. She lives in Cambridge, Mass., with her husband and four children.
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