Alex Ness graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a B.A. in Music. He continued his music studies in India (studying tabla and Hindustani vocal music in Varanasi for a year), then through an M.A. at New York University, where he received the Dean's Outstanding Teaching Award in the Humanities as a music theory instructor. He worked for several years as the music director of Playground Sessions, an educational software company, while continuing to create his own experimental multimedia compositions.

More recently, Alex's interests in acoustics and signal processing led him back to STEM coursework. He received a B.S. in Mathematics from Indiana University, a Digital Signal Processing certificate from UCSD, and an M.S. in Statistical Data Science from San Francisco State University. He has put his STEM skills to use both creatively (by writing custom audio software) and professionally (by returning to Playground Sessions as a data analyst).

Alex has been a STEM tutor at Scholar Co since 2016, working with students of all ages and abilities. He has extensive experience tutoring all standard math courses from pre-algebra up to calculus and linear algebra, as well as various physics, engineering, and programming courses. Now in his work as a PEP advisor, Alex supports students in designing, planning, and executing independent projects in a range of STEM fields, with a particular focus on helping students with data analysis and real-world programming challenges.