Gemm Learning founder, Geoff Nixon, was born in 1954 in New Zealand.  He completed a Masters of Commerce, Honors at the University of Canterbury, majors in Accounting and Economics. At the age of 23 he headed overseas on a five-year adventure that included working on a kibbutz in Israel, trekking across Asia and traveling over-land from Cape Town to Cairo, broken up with working stints in London and South Africa. 

His first career was finance.  After three in New Zealand he moved to the US to set up a New York office of a public NZ investment firm.  He made the United States his home after meeting his wife, Anne McCool (the second M in Gemm), in 1989.  They were married in 1990.  Geoff was one of the early movers in the hedge fund world, opening up a long-short hedge fund in 1992.  The Fund had a successful track record -- clients made up to 7.1 times their money over 14 years. 

One of the Fund's largest investments was Scientific Learning, the developer of Fast ForWord software.   He spent hours talking to clinicians and schools about their success with this software.  And in 2005 he saw this success first hand as the software helped kick start his 7-year old son's academic progress.  And yet, Scientific Learning was not a great stock. This got Geoff thinking.  This software was reaching not reaching all of the kids that could benefit from it due to the Company's focus on large, mostly struggling school districts. 

At around the same time Geoff started to tire of the money management business. And so he made the decision late in 2005 to shut down his fund, and take on a new mission: to find a way to deliver Fast ForWord as a service to the public in a way that is motivating for the kids, while being convenient and affordable for the parents.  This is how Westchester Learning, now called Gemm Learning, was founded in early 2006.

The original concept was for Gemm to provide a range of leading-edge therapies that impact learning ability -- Geoff figured that if Fast ForWord works, then it's likely other therapies work also.   This is where Geoff's hard-nosed research skills came in handy.  In the first year Gemm investigated dozens of promising approaches, but soon came to realize that Fast ForWord is head and shoulders above the rest.  And so Gemm started out primarily offering Fast ForWord.  Geoff however is Gemm's chief researcher and new approaches are being investigated constantly. 

Geoff lives in Pelham with his wife, Anne, and two children Matthew (the first M in Gemm) and Emma (the E with a tiara in Gemm).  Recent interests include the Pelham Education Foundation, travel soccer coaching and a mid-life crisis cover band called The Weekenders.