Ben Turtel Joins The Garage as EIR

Ben Turtel has joined The Garage at Northwestern as an entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR). EIRs at The Garage are accomplished entrepreneurs, investors, and professionals who work on their own projects alongside Northwestern student-founders and serve as mentors for student led projects. 

“I’m excited to participate in such an ambitious effort to foster entrepreneurship and a startup community at Northwestern. The Garage is a fantastic resource for students and I’ve been impressed by the variety and depth of the projects being developed here. I’ve had a great experience with these student founders so far and I’m looking forward to working with more of them,” said Turtel.

Ben is currently the founder and CTO of Rivet in Google’s incubator Area120, a reading app for kids that uses machine learning to provide assistance during independent reading practice. Previously, he was a senior software engineer in applied machine learning for 6+ years at Google and has developed solutions in machine learning, natural language processing, and data science for a variety of startups.

“Even before Ben officially joined The Garage as an EIR, he had generously volunteered his time and expertise to student entrepreneurs, an invaluable real-world perspective from an accomplished entrepreneur. We’re ecstatic that Ben is joining us as an EIR to have an even greater impact on our community, and excited to see what he builds next,” said Mike Raab, associate director of The Garage. 

Ben holds a Masters in Scientific Computing from NYU Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and a BA in Mathematics and Philosophy from Northwestern. Ben is currently doing a part-time individualized masters at NYU Gallatin, where his degree is focused on the societal and political implications of advances in artificial intelligence and technology as they relate to free will, democracy, and human flourishing.

Ben joins other accomplished founders like Andrew and Thomas Parkinson, serial entrepreneurs and co-founders of Peapod, and technologists like Tom Hayden, an engineer on the fraud team at Facebook who built out the data infrastructure at GrubHub. The EIR program is a volunteer, unpaid position and participation is by invitation only.