Brad Cooley

Brad’s interest in computer science dates back to the sixth grade when he designed his first website for a class project. Built using HTML and CSS, it was gratifying to see the tangible fruits of his labor. By eighth grade, he had designed an app to aggregate homework assignments from various classes. And by junior year, he had written his first published app that used crowdsourcing to determine restaurant wait times; written in Swift, it won the inaugural Congressional App Challenge in his home state of Colorado.

Brad went on to double-major in computer science and data science at Marquette University. While there, he became heavily involved with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) where he wrote Abacus, a programming competition platform. To date, the platform has served thousands of high school students in Wisconsin and Indiana and was even turned into a class at Marquette.