Senior Instructional Designer, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Legend has it that as a child, Sebastian would answer the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with “I wanna be a Smoker”. This childhood dream didn’t work out, but instead he decided to do the next best thing: become an award-winning educational technologist and teacher of teachers. After growing up in Germany and adding a Master’s degree in Computer Science to his qualifications, he then wound up in the Netherlands, where he completed a PhD in Educational Technology. After spending three years as PostDoc in the field of digital inclusion in higher education, he bid his farewell to the old world and migrated to the US. After exploring a few dead ends, he ended up in Chicago where he met his future wife with whom he now lives in Urbana, with a daughter, a cat and a dog.

He was hired by UIUC right before the pandemic, and has worked as Instructional Designer in Computer Science since then. He is known to be a most efficient and reliable in finding simple solutions for even the most ludicrous problems, and he pushes learning innovation in the direction of immersive computing as well as generative AI. He has done successfully so, and recently won the annual Staff Award.