Our Story
Welcome to WonderWorks Lab, where learning meets creativity and curiosity leads the way. We're Gwyneth and Sarah - co-founders, longtime friends, and passionate advocates for the future of STEM education.
We met at Harvard a decade ago—Gwyneth was pursuing a career in clinical research and Sarah was studying statistics. Since then, we’ve each built careers rooted in science. Over the years, our careers took us through research labs and frontier technology companies—places where we learned that STEM is profoundly human. It requires creativity, empathy, iteration, resilience and a commitment to understanding problems thoroughly and from the ground up. Those experiences, combined with our own personal journeys, eventually converged in to WonderWorks Lab.
Gwyneth grew up as the daughter of an educator and an engineer, and the granddaughter of two math professors. That upbringing brought her the belief that every child has the potential to see themselves as a scientist, engineer, or creator when given meaningful opportunities. That belief became deeply personal when her daughter entered Bay Area public elementary school. She saw firsthand the limitations around hands-on science learning. Many teachers and schools face significant constraints in resources, time, and funding, which can make it challenging to provide sustained, high-quality STEM experiences. That realization became the spark for WonderWorks Lab: a commitment to building accessible, engaging, and science-based curriculum that brings STEM to life for all students.
Sarah’s path was shaped by leading a group of engineers, designers, and researchers to bring real-world products to life. Engineering is far more than formulas or code. It is a human-centered discipline—systems thinking, user-centered design, empathy, and navigating real-world constraints. The circuit diagrams learnt in school represent only about 1% of the journey. Real products require materials selection, manufacturing tolerances, quality control, iterative prototyping, and, above all, a deep understanding of how humans will engage with them.
As the world accelerates into the AI era, something essential has been lost in education. We talk endlessly about coding, robotics, and “future-proofing,” yet we rarely ask the more fundamental question: what does a wholesome, joyful, human future look like for our children—and how do we prepare them for it?
STEM is not just a pathway to jobs. It is a lens for understanding the world. The laws of nature—electricity, buoyancy, sound waves, magnetism—are beautiful and awe-inspiring. The technologies we craft—circuits, bridges, engines, sensors—are expressions of creativity, problem-solving, and empathy.
This is why we created WonderWorks Lab.