Helen Wang
6crickets Inc. CEO and Founder
Dr. Helen Wang is the CEO and cofounder of
6crickets.com. Our mission is to bring the best enrichment to every child by leveraging community efforts and modern technologies. Parents work 2,000 hours, but children are in school for only 1,000 hours. So, out-of-school time is HALF of K-12 education. Today, out-of-school time is a still a wild, wild west, calling for the fundamental infrastructure support. Backed by the National Science Foundation, Helen cofounded 6crickets in 2014 and has been leading her team to build the technology infrastructure and robust processes that seamlessly interconnect key stakeholders in the enrichment ecosystem, namely, schools and districts, enrichment providers, and parents. For districts and schools, 6crickets provides a turn-key enrichment solution that organizes enrichment providers to teach quality enrichment on school campuses while ensuring student safety, equity, and efficiency. For enrichment providers, 6crickets provides class management, registration and marketing solutions to streamline operations and increase enrollments. For parents, 6crickets is the one-stop destination to discover, schedule and register for enrichment activities anywhere anytime. To date, 6crickets has supported 2.3M enrichment learning hours from 1290 providers at 559 schools in 122 districts throughout the nation.
Helen oversees the company's the strategic directions, product roadmap, customer relations, operations, and advanced research. Helen is a world-renowned computer scientist. Prior to 6crickets, she founded and led the security and privacy research group and was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft research (MSR). During her 14 year tenure at MSR, she led pioneering research in systems, web, and mobile security, publishing influential papers at top security, privacy, and systems academic conferences and transferring research technologies into real-world products like Microsoft Windows and all web browsers. Helen received numerous Technology Transfer awards, Gold Star awards from Microsoft, and best paper awards from top conferences. Helen chaired and served at steering committees for top conferences and mentored 30+ Ph.D. students who have all become leaders in the tech industry.