Alumni Spotlight: Victor and Andrés Explore Whether Robots Can Help Children Learn to Read

Victor Antony ’17 and Andrés de la Sierra Renier ’18 first met as students at TGS. Years later, their friendship has grown into a shared venture combining Victor’s background in computer science and robotics with Andrés’s experience in public policy, philanthropy, and nonprofit work. Now living and working together in Baltimore, they are listening to educators, administrators, and families as they explore how social robots could thoughtfully support young readers in the classroom.

1. How did your journey from TGS lead you to where you are today?

Victor graduated from TGS in 2017 and went on to study computer science at the University of Rochester, where he quickly became involved in research. As a research assistant at the Interplay Lab, he helped build an augmented reality platform designed to support American Sign Language learning and communication between deaf children and hearing parents.

He also worked at the Rochester Human-Computer Interaction Lab and interned at Google, contributing to TensorFlow for Swift. His early research into social robotics, which he began at Johns Hopkins with elder care populations, helped inspire what we are building now.

Andrés graduated from TGS in 2018 and attended NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where students design their own degrees. He built his around public policy, sustainability, and social entrepreneurship.

After graduating in two and a half years, Andrés worked in foster care advocacy, immigrant rights, and nonprofit operations before joining JPMorgan Private Bank as a philanthropy advisor. There, he helped high-net-worth clients plan their charitable giving. The work was interesting, but over time, he began to feel too removed from the communities affected by those decisions. That was roughly when our conversations about translating Victor’s research into something practical became more serious.

We had stayed in touch throughout those years, with both of us living in New York for stretches and crossing paths regularly. When Andrés left JPMorgan, we began mapping out what it might look like to bring Victor’s research out of the lab. We applied for non-dilutive funding, worked on our pitch, and started speaking with people in Baltimore.

Andrés moved to Baltimore in January 2026 to work on the project full-time. Now, we are both here, meeting directly with school administrators and educators to understand what early literacy programs actually need and where our work might fit in.

2. What are you working on right now, and what impact is it having?

We are working to bring small tabletop social robots into classrooms, with an initial focus on early literacy. The robots lead assisted reading and guided storytelling sessions with young children, helping them develop vocabulary, fluency, phonics, and reading accuracy.

We are developing the project under the name Everybody Robotics. We are still pre-incorporation, though, so we try not to get too far ahead of ourselves when describing it.

Much of our time is currently spent in Baltimore, sitting down with teachers, school administrators, and families to understand where these robots could genuinely be useful and where they might simply get in the way. We are also exploring elder care as a potential second area, including applications related to cognitive exercises and companionship, but early literacy is where we are starting.

The larger question behind our work is whether robots can be introduced into people’s homes and schools without repeating what happened during the last wave of consumer technology. Social media was effectively the first consumer AI product most people encountered, and much of it was not designed in ways that served users well.

Robots are going to enter these spaces regardless. We would rather help determine how that happens thoughtfully from the beginning.

3. What skills or experiences from TGS have been most useful in your work?

The most practical thing TGS gave us was the ability to feel comfortable walking into unfamiliar rooms and situations. You cannot spend two years moving between countries, living with people from completely different backgrounds, and repeatedly being the new person without developing the habit of stepping outside your comfort zone.

That experience helps when we sit down with teachers in West Baltimore to understand what their classrooms actually need or meet with funders whose frames of reference are very different from our own. TGS taught us to listen first and assume that we are missing something.

It also shapes how we approach the work itself. We are starting with specific communities and asking what would actually be useful to them, rather than beginning with a technical solution and searching for somewhere to apply it.

TGS also taught us how to work through disagreement without allowing it to become a bigger problem than whatever we were disagreeing about. At TGS, you regularly find yourself in situations where you have to work things out because there is no option to simply walk away. That turned out to be useful preparation for a co-founder relationship.

4. What is it like working together, and how do your strengths complement each other?

We work together all day and then return to the same row home. There is not much separation between work and everything else right now.

We have been in some version of this dynamic since TGS. Victor was Model UN president, and Andrés was a delegate. Victor was student council president, and Andrés was treasurer before succeeding him after he graduated. There is a long history of one of us picking up where the other left off, or disagreeing about how something should be done and having to resolve it because the work still needs to happen.

The clearest division today is that Victor is the technical founder. He leads the product and goes deep on the engineering, developing interventions that will hold up over time rather than simply work in a demonstration.

Andrés handles more of the business and operational side, including funding applications, community relationships, and the administrative work that keeps Victor from being constantly pulled away from the technical side.

At this stage, however, we are both constantly drifting into each other’s lanes. We join calls together, edit the same documents, debate the same pitch, and then make dinner.

Victor moves quickly and likes to lock things in. Andrés tends to slow down and look for where a plan might break before committing to it. We poke holes in each other’s thinking in ways that make the work better, and we have known each other long enough to understand when to push and when to back off.

5. What would you say to a family considering TGS today?

Families drawn to TGS probably already have some sense of what they are looking for. Often, it is a student who is curious, a little restless, and does not quite fit the shape of a conventional school.

What TGS does, in practical terms, is turn exposure to difference into something you practice rather than something you study. You can read about other cultures, take courses in international relations, and watch documentaries. Something different happens when you are actually living somewhere, navigating the rhythms of a place, and making mistakes in its language. You cannot replicate that entirely through coursework.

The other thing we would tell families is that the community stays with you.

We are a fairly clear example: two alumni working and living together in Baltimore years after graduating. But it also appears in smaller ways. If a fellow alum reaches out and asks to grab coffee or stay on your couch, the answer is basically yes by default, whether or not your time at TGS overlapped.

There is a shorthand among TGS alumni that can take years to develop with most people, but with them, it is already there. TGS becomes a chosen family, and that connection follows you well beyond high school.