Our Team is on a Mission
We have a vision for making performance assessment much, much better, and we’ve got the leadership expertise to do it. Our next generation tools not only make performance assessment possible, they improve education and produce better and more capable students.
MZD Career Opportunities
Zac Henrich
Zac is an experienced senior leader and proven product development expert in the education technology domain. His 10+ years of experience as a technology leader for some of the largest organizations in the educational assessment industry have provided him experience with the development of educational software products through the entire product lifecycle.
Zac Henrich
Chief Executive Officer
Zac has worked in the EdTech space for the last 11 years. Throughout his career he has led product development teams building online assessment platform solutions at Pearson, ACT, Parcc Inc. and CenterPoint Education.
Zac received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Administration from Wartburg College and his Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from the University of Iowa. He is also a certified Project Management Professional (PMP)
Miles Loring
Miles’s continued contributions to the advancement of performance scoring technologies has helped define market leadership through the implementation of cutting-edge scoring functionality and reporting capabilities used to score globally recognized assessments. He has several years experience in the area of machine scoring with the industry leading organization in artificial intelligence (AI) scoring technologies.
Miles Loring
Chief Technology Officer
Miles’s continued contributions to the advancement of performance scoring technologies has helped define market leadership through the implementation of cutting-edge scoring functionality and reporting capabilities used to score globally recognized assessments. He has several year’s experience in the area of machine scoring with the industry leading organization in artificial intelligence (AI) scoring technologies.
Miles has been instrumental in the advancement of continuous flow as a methodology for AI training and calibration. He led a team of engineers as part of his responsibilities as the Senior Developer for Pearson Knowledge Technologies and led the technology roadmap for the PKT strategic development.
Miles holds multiple patents in the area of performance scoring. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Computer Science from the University of Iowa.
“During my career, I have spent a great deal of my time working to improve the quality and accuracy of performance scoring, often times with limited input to the systems. That is why I am incredibly enthusiastic about OSCAR, and am proud to say I helped (these kids) develop it.”
A Message from Daisy
“I have been in the performance assessment scoring business for over thirty years, both as a client and as a contractor. During my career, I have spent a great deal of my time working to improve the quality and accuracy of performance scoring, often times with limited input to the systems. That is why I am incredibly enthusiastic about OSCAR, a new scoring platform, and am proud to say I helped (these kids) develop it. 😉
It is easy to setup and easy to use. So easy to use that clients whether they are contractors or educators, can enter their prompts, rubrics, training materials, and scorers and be ready to score in minutes.
It is flexible. Trainers are able to create their training within the system and easily make changes when necessary. They are able to create validity checks and calibration up front or during the scoring process.
It is quick. Clients are able to easily set up the system, make changes to the scoring rules, and to move from one item to another. Training can be adjusted or altered in minutes.
It is inexpensive. Large-scale, high volume scoring is pennies per essay. Small projects are completed at a price point that is easy to realize value.
It provides quality. Clients are able to configure training, qualification, calibration, and validity sets and monitor real time results.
Last, but not least, the reporting capabilities provide views into scorer performance that I have been wanting and the industry has been needing for years.
Daisy Vickers
Daisy began her career in performance assessment after teaching both high school and college English. In her first job with Harcourt, she learned the ropes as a scorer and scoring supervisor. In her second scoring season, she joined Measurement Incorporated (MI) where she worked as a scoring director for a number of projects across the span of five years. From MI, she moved to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) where she became the consultant for all performance assessment. In that position, she was responsible for the development, administration, scoring and reporting across all content areas.
Download performance scoring research completed by Daisy Vickers
Daisy Vickers
Vice President, Performance Scoring and Research
Daisy began her career in performance assessment after teaching both high school and college English. In her first job with Harcourt, she learned the ropes as a scorer and scoring supervisor. In her second scoring season, she joined Measurement Incorporated (MI) where she worked as a scoring director for a number of projects across the span of five years. From MI, she moved to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) where she became the consultant for all performance assessment. In that position, she was responsible for the development, administration, scoring and reporting across all content areas.
From NCDPI, Ms. Vickers took a position at Pearson as the Director of Performance Scoring. In that role, she was responsible for customer contacts, scoring design, and the quality metrics associated with all performance scoring projects. During this time, she was also heavily involved with helping clients create and modify rubrics, develop training, and create organizational models for operational scoring. Projects at Pearson included SAT, NBPTS, ACT, and numerous state assessments. She was also responsible for research involving performance scoring and later moved to the Next Generation Research Center within Pearson.
Daisy joined the OSCAR team as Vice President of Performance Scoring and Research in January 2016. In this role, she is available to consult with clients on performance scoring issues, rubric development, item development, scoring models, scoring quality, training, and research.
William Kerr
Michael Powell
A technical leader with deep assessment industry knowledge and subject matter expertise, Michael brings an accomplished understanding of the issues that clients face when implementing or integrating new technologies. His sensitivity to client business drivers, coupled with a seasoned familiarity with the operational issues that complex assessment systems and programs must solve, have provided him with the expertise necessary to deliver solutions that enrich this niche space. With over 20 years of software development experience and 15 years in the education industry, Michael has a proven ability to realize opportunities for creating lasting and differentiated intellectual property.
Adam Louly
Adam holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science & Mathematics from Tetouan, Morocco as well as a Master of Science in Computer Science & Business Intelligence from the National School of Applied Sciences in Al Hoceima, Morocco. Adam has worked as a Machine Learning Engineer at AdRejection and as a Data Scientist for XHUB in Morocco before joining MZD.
Kaleb McKone
Kaleb holds a Bachelor of Arts: Computer Science and a Bachelor of Science: Mathematics from the University of Iowa. While as an undergraduate, he worked as an intern at Thomson Reuters where he was a member of the cloud center of excellence, a team specializing in cloud infrastructure in Amazon Web Services. In his last year of school at Iowa, he served as the developer for a web-based assessment platform used in ongoing autism and learning-disability research. Before joining MZ Development, Kaleb worked at Target Corporation, where he helped manage the computer infrastructure in every Target store, totaling almost 6,000 individual servers.
Chairman of the Board
Dr. Richard Ferguson
Richard is a higher education innovator, best known for serving as the CEO and Chairman of ACT where he was responsible strategic visioning and futures planning for the corporation, as well as leadership in the pursuit of ACT’s mission. During his 38 years at ACT, the organization grew from fewer than 100 staff and a single program — its college admission test — to nearly 1,500 staff and over 50 programs and services. Under his leadership, ACT’s services included a broad range of assessments encompassing all levels of the educational continuum and a growing array of assessment systems supportive of economic and workforce development. During his final years as CEO, ACT engaged in an extensive developmental agenda that included the creation of international subsidiaries based in Sydney, Australia and Shanghai, China.
Dr. Richard Ferguson
Chairman of the Board
Richard is a higher education innovator, best known for serving as the CEO and Chairman of ACT where he was responsible strategic visioning and futures planning for the corporation, as well as leadership in the pursuit of ACT’s mission. During his 38 years at ACT, the organization grew from fewer than 100 staff and a single program — its college admission test — to nearly 1,500 staff and over 50 programs and services. Under his leadership, ACT’s services included a broad range of assessments encompassing all levels of the educational continuum and a growing array of assessment systems supportive of economic and workforce development. During his final years as CEO, ACT engaged in an extensive developmental agenda that included the creation of international subsidiaries based in Sydney, Australia and Shanghai, China.
After retiring from ACT in 2010, he joined Dallas, Texas based Best Associates as Vice Chairman. That company founded several education companies focused on helping individuals in this country and abroad earn college degrees. One of those companies, Academic Partnerships, helps public universities deliver and market their degrees online. In September 2012, Dr. Ferguson retired from Best Associates but continued to chair one of its companies — Higher Education Holdings, which owns The American College of Education, a privately held, regionally accredited, online higher education institution based in Indianapolis.
In recent years, Dr. Ferguson has remained active in the education domain by investing in, joining and chairing the boards of several educational technology companies: Higher Learning Technologies, Inc., College Raptor, Inc., OpenEd, Inc. (acquired by ACT in 2016), Qualified, Inc., and MZ Development. He is currently serving as CEO and cofounder of Malum, Inc., an emerging company focused on school and workforce security using AI technology developed through funding provided by the U.S. military and Homeland Security.
Throughout his career, Dr. Ferguson has written on a broad cross-section of education and training issues. He has served on numerous advisory boards on education and testing and has been a frequent speaker at educational meetings in the U.S. and abroad. While affiliated with ACT, Dr. Ferguson also held an adjunct appointment with the Psychological and Quantitative Foundations Department, College of Education, the University of Iowa. Prior to that, he held concurrent appointments as: (1) a Research Associate at the Learning Research and Development Center, and (2) Lecturer, Educational Research Department, School of Education, both at the University of Pittsburgh. His professional experience also includes five years of teaching secondary school mathematics.
MZ Development is pleased to present the following career opportunities with our organization. MZ Development is an equal opportunity employer that offers generous benefits and a flexible working environment intended to better align with today’s active workforce. Here is a list of current offerings. If you’re interested, contact us at contact@mzdevinc.com.
Software Engineer
This position will be part of a virtual team of engineers who have a love for education and developing technology to improve it. Responsibilities include gathering user requirements, defining system functionality and writing code in various languages.
