Sawyer Education was founded by Nikki T. Sawyer, Ph.D., a neuroscientist, educator, science communicator, and self-taught full-stack developer who has spent much of her career finding better ways to help people understand science.
Nikki earned her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Emory University, where her research focused on genetics, stress, and epilepsy. She has authored and co-authored peer-reviewed research in neuroscience and biology and has taught science at the university level for more than a decade, with courses ranging from anatomy and physiology and introductory biology to neurobiology, cell and molecular biology, and biocomputing.
Alongside her academic work, Nikki has spent years in web development, building and maintaining websites and working with technologies including PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML, Python, and server-side infrastructure. She also incorporates AI-assisted development into her workflow, using AI as a collaborative tool for research, coding, design, brainstorming, and rapid prototyping while retaining human direction, review, and final decision-making.
Her work as an educator has consistently centered on one idea: science becomes easier to learn when people can connect it to something meaningful. Rather than asking learners simply to memorize information, she emphasizes understanding how concepts fit together, applying them to new situations, asking better questions, and developing the confidence to keep learning independently.
That philosophy now extends beyond the traditional classroom through Sawyer Education. By combining science, teaching, technology, storytelling, humor, and interactive design, Nikki is building new ways for people to encounter science.
