Bill Tan

Bill Tan

Harvard Graduate School of Education
Bill Tan

Let's Read in Two Languages | New York, NY

 

Bill Tan is a Master of Education candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is passionate about eliminating the language barrier for marginalized communities and delighting children and grownups alike with the joy of being a polyglot.

As an entrepreneur and inventor, Bill has founded Transcendent Endeavors, an innovation studio that creates technology-enabled solutions for the healthcare and education sectors. Its notable successes include the Canopy Language Access Suite that encompasses the #1 most widely used medical Spanish e-learning system in the U.S. and other tools, and the Starling Bedside Communication System, a multilingual patient-nurse messaging platform that was acquired by a publicly traded healthcare company for national rollout. Bill has been the Principal Investigator on numerous NIH-funded innovation projects, including multi-year awards from the Eugene Kennedy National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) for creating the Bi-Lingual Story Switching Method (BLoSSoM) that facilitates dual-language parent-child co-reading. One of Bill’s favorite projects was his collaboration with Sesame Workshop on its “You Can Ask!” initiative to educate parents on the mental health needs of young children following the events of September 11, 2001. Through the project, several hundred thousand multilingual toolkits were distributed to families and community-based organizations in the New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C. areas. 

Bill received a bachelor’s degree from the Stern School of Business at New York University, and served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine at NYU School of Medicine. Bill was also named one of Crain’s 40 Under 40 Rising Stars, and a New York City Venture Fellow by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Fellowship Recipients