Stephen Pettus
About

I build AI systems that try to meet people where they are.

For the past decade I've been an engineer in most of the ways you can be one. A startup CTO, a teacher, and now a senior engineer at McGraw Hill, on the platforms behind learning systems used by millions of students. Lately I build applied-AI systems: LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic workflows that turn scattered context into something useful. Somewhere along the way, one question kept following me home: why do the tools we build understand so little about the people using them?

That question became my research. This fall I begin a PhD in Information Science at Drexel as an NSF fellow, studying how AI can respond to a person's cognitive state, their focus, uncertainty, and readiness, not just their prompts. I still build constantly. Making things is how I think and help people.