Helix Education CEO and leadership

Adam has almost 20 years of finance, strategy and operational experience including senior leadership roles in the education, luxury travel, software and investment management industries.

Prior to his role as Chief Financial Officer at Helix, Adam was the Vice President of Finance at Inspirato, a worldwide private vacation club. Before that he held the same position at TopSchool, a SaaS based Student Information System serving the education industry. In this role, Adam was involved in raising over $20M in capital, a $12M software acquisition, and led the eventual sale of the company to a private equity firm in 2013. Earlier in his career, Adam spent over nine years in the investment industry, as a Senior Equity Analyst at $40B Invesco Funds Group and as a Founder and Portfolio Manager at Deer Creek Capital Partners, a long/short equity technology and telecommunications hedge fund. In addition, Adam was a Financial Analyst at Emergency Medical Services Corp. as part of their Mergers and Acquisitions team.

Adam holds a Masters in Business Administration from Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, a BA from the University of Michigan and was awarded the Chartered Financial Analyst designation in 2001.

Cherron is a veteran higher education professional with expertise in academic administration, including learning outcomes assessment and curriculum design. She is also well versed in enrollment management, adult education, and technology to support student services.

Her career experiences have been diverse-working for a mid-sized public institution and small, private institutions to support traditional undergraduate students as well as non-traditional, working adults seeking degree completion or graduate degrees.

As Chief Academic Officer and Vice President at Helix Education, Cherron provides thought leadership for best practices in post-traditional, online and competency-based education models. Her knowledge and ideas help Helix Education deliver the solutions that keep students engaged and retained through graduation, supporting and reinforcing successful student outcomes. Cherron’s work includes leading the Helix Instructional Design Services team, developing learning outcomes assessment methodologies for clients, and researching student success and completion using Helix Acuity business intelligence.

Prior to joining Helix Education, Cherron served as dean of undergraduate programs for the Ageno School of Business at Golden Gate University. She led both recruitment and retention efforts by managing services related to outreach, admissions, academic advising, international student services, career and internship services, counseling, disability services, student life, graduation certification and commencement. She has also served as an adjunct faculty member teaching business management, American government, and student success courses.

Cherron earned a bachelor of science in criminal justice and a master of public administration, both at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. In addition, she holds a doctorate of education (Ed.D.) from The University of Alabama with a specialization in higher education administration.

Chris brings more than 15 years of higher education software development experience to Helix as an engineer, architect, and product lead. In 2005, Chris joined eCollege where he led the LMS integrations team. Upon Pearson Education’s acquisition of eCollege, Chris’ role expanded to platform architecture, powering a learning platform that served over 16 million daily users.

Chris has partnered with more than 40 colleges and universities to deliver highly-cohesive integrations that power student enrollment, retention and learning. Chris holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Metropolitan State College of Denver.

John brings more than 20 years of education technology experience to Helix with a focus on application hosting, IT security and corporate productivity disciplines. Prior to Helix, John led high-performing technology teams at Pearson eCollege, building and supporting a global infrastructure of more than 300 educational platforms, including Pearson LearningStudio, MyLabs and Mastering and Fronter. In addition, John has evangelized the use of next-generation approaches to building high-quality educational applications such as hybrid cloud adoption, migrations from enterprise to open source technology stacks, ITIL process improvement, IT automation, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), DevOps and IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS).

Prior to joining Pearson, John was a Captain in the U.S. Air Force who as Chief, Internet Programs led the team that built and supported the first internet-based distance learning platform for the Air Command and Staff College.