NAQT Member Biographies

As a limited liability corporation, NAQT is effectively a partnership run by members who divide the responsibilities of writing questions, organizing tournaments, and running a business. This page lists NAQT's current members. We also maintain biographies of members emeriti who are still involved in an advisory capacity and former members who have moved on to other things.

R. Robert Hentzel
President, Chief Technical Officer, and Chief Editor
R. Robert Hentzel graduated from Iowa State University with degrees in Physics and Mathematics. An avid and successful academic competitor since high school, in 1992 Robert founded the Iowa State Academic Quiz Bowl Club. Robert won the 2006 N. Gordon Carper Lifetime Achievement Award "for meritorious services in sustaining and enriching collegiate academic competitions" and the 2010 Benjamin Cooper Academic Ambassador Award "for his dedication to popularizing pyramidal questions in high school quizbowl in new regions around the United States." Robert and his wife Emily Pike and their sons Nathaniel and Timothy currently reside in Bloomington, Minnesota. He became a member of NAQT in 1997.

Dwight Kidder
Executive Director
Director of New College Programs
Liaison to the Association of College Unions International (ACUI)
Dwight Kidder graduated from Cornell University with Bachelors and Masters degrees in Mechanical Engineering. Dwight played one year for Chartiers-Houston High School in Pennsylvania, and still holds the league's record for individual scoring. While a player at Cornell University, Dwight founded the Academic Quiz Organization and appeared in six national championship tournaments. When not writing for NAQT, Dwight advises several western Pennsylvania college teams and maintains the Reference Desk, the largest list of question writing resources for academic competition teams. Though he doubts the truth of the statement, Dwight is widely regarded as the greatest active player in the country in "Trash" (popular culture and sports-only) tournaments. Dwight was a founding member of NAQT.

Chad Kubicek
Chief Financial Officer
Director of Community College Programs
Chad Kubicek grew up in Columbus, Nebraska, where the lack of quizbowl opportunities led him to join the forensics team, where he became Columbus High's first-ever double-ruby member of the National Forensic League. Matriculating at Iowa State University, he joined the quizbowl team as a freshman, was a teammate of Rob Hentzel for five years, and served as the club's treasurer and tournament director before graduating with a degree in mathematics. He became a full member of NAQT in 2000 and was elected CFO in 2003. Chad and his wife Shelly and their beautiful baby boy Matthew currently reside in the Kansas City area.

Emily Pike
Vice President for Operations
Emily's dream of playing quiz bowl was first sparked by the television show Head of the Class, and, ironically, her first quiz bowl coaches were the special education teachers in her junior high school. Highlights of her ten-year playing career include captaining the DeKalb High School team in the Illinois state championships and captaining Carleton College's "Surge Squad" to the 1999 NAQT Undergraduate National Championship. Emily graduated with a B.A. in chemistry from Carleton and earned her M.D. from Loyola University Chicago's Stritch School of Medicine. She completed her residency in family medicine at the Fairview-University Medical Center and Smiley's Clinic in Minneapolis and is now an urgent-care physician for Fairview Clinics. In her spare time, which is much rarer now that she's a mom, she enjoys reading, cooking, playing the piano, doing crossword puzzles, and playing board games. Emily became a member of NAQT in 2000.

Jeff Hoppes
Vice President for Communication
Jeff played quiz bowl for four years at Manheim Township High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. During his undergraduate years at Princeton University, he helped lead its team to three NAQT undergraduate titles. He moved on to graduate school at the University of California-Berkeley, where his teams won one ACF and two NAQT national titles. Jeff became a member of NAQT in 2009.

Eric Bell
Director of High School Programs
Eric Bell holds a degree in mathematics from the University of Oklahoma. Eric won two state Academic Bowl titles at Broken Arrow High School and was a five-time Nationals All-Star as the co-founder of the Oklahoma Academic Team. Eric founded the Oklahoma Quiz Bowl Alliance series of high school tournaments. In 2010 Eric moved to Las Vegas where he works as a tournament director for the American Contract Bridge League. In his free time, Eric still plays bridge (holding the rank of Silver Life Master) and is a militant Oklahoma Sooners fan. Eric was a founding member of NAQT.

Joel Gluskin
ICT and HSNCT Logistics Director
Joel Gluskin grew up in Buffalo Grove, IL, where he played on the quiz bowl team at Adlai E. Stevenson High School, including the team that won the school's first state championship in 2000. Joel has an undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis, where he majored in mathematics, political science, and economics. Currently, Joel lives in Houston, where he is a trader on the commodities desk at Citigroup. Joel became a member in 2006.

Craig D. Barker
A native of Livonia, Michigan, Craig Barker played four years of quiz bowl at Livonia Stevenson High School, leading the Double Blue and White to the 1995 State Finals. He then played four and a half years as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, where he won academic national championships in 1998 and 2000, as well as "TRASH" national championships in 2000, 2003, and 2007. The 1997 Jeopardy! college champion, Craig graduated from Michigan in 2000 with a B.A. in History and a Secondary Education certification and now works as a World/AP U.S. History teacher at his alma mater. He earned his Masters Degree in 2004. Craig is the founder of The Maize Pages, the largest academic competitions portal on the web and one of the first comprehensive public contact directories of academic teams. Craig became a member of NAQT in 2001 and has previously served as NAQT's Vice President of Operations.

Matt Bruce
Matt grew up in Tulsa and led the Booker T. Washington High School Academic Bowl Team to a national championship in 1992. At Harvard he was part of the only sibling pair ever to play on opposite sides of a college quiz national championship final (his side won). He now lives near San Francisco and works at Facebook. He is the author of several spreadsheet tools for tournament scheduling and statkeeping, and he often runs the control/HQ rooms at NAQT's national championships.

Peter Freeman
Peter Freeman holds a Ph.D. in Astrophysics, and he now works at Carnegie Mellon University, where he works as an astrostatistician analyzing cosmology data. He first picked up a buzzer at Coronado High School, just outside of San Diego, in 1983, and he continued playing as an undergraduate at the University of California and as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. While at Chicago, he played on National Championship-winning teams in 1993 and 1994, and he also created the first question archive on the Internet. After leaving Chicago, he founded the Arizona State University quiz bowl team and coached it to a fourth-place National Championship finish in 1999. Peter was a founding member (1996) of NAQT and previously served as NAQT's Vice President for Operations.

Ken Jennings
Ken Jennings grew up in Seoul, Korea and then played quiz bowl for BYU for three years before graduating with a degree in computer science. In 2004, he took advantage of a recent rule change on Jeopardy! and appeared on the show 75 times, earning $2.5 million and more than his allotted 15 minutes of fame in the process. He has recently completed his first book, Brainiac, which deals with the history of trivia and American quiz culture. He and his wife Mindy live in Seattle with their son Dylan, daughter Caitlin, and their Labrador retriever Banjo. He currently edits literature and mythology questions for NAQT, which means he can now edit an Osiris/Isis/Horus bonus in his sleep.

Chris Nolte
Chris Nolte grew up in the quizbowl-deprived area of Carmel, California. He played in intramural tournaments while an undergraduate at Stanford, and as a graduate student was one of the founding members of the Caltech Quizbowl Club. He is now a postdoctoral fellow with the Environmental Protection Agency in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, where he is a member of the development team for the Community Multi-scale Air Quality (CMAQ) model. Chris served as NAQT's Vice President of Operations from 2004 to 2006.

Andy Watkins
Andy Watkins played his first high school quizbowl tournaments in Pittsburgh; as a result, they were all directed by Dwight Kidder. In college, Andy began writing and editing for both high school and college, head editing two HSNCTs and an NSC, as well as three of the six Harvard Fall Tournaments to date. Along with Dallas Simons, Andy was one of two players on both of Harvard's DI ICT championship teams in 2010 and 2011. Andy is currently a happily married chemistry grad student at NYU.

Andrew Yaphe
Andrew grew up in Virginia, and became involved in academic competition while attending Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in the early 1990s. As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, he led his team to two ACF titles, and won three more while a graduate student in English at the University of Chicago, where he also picked up two NAQT championships. While attending Stanford Law School, he won his sixth ACF national championship in 2010. Formerly the director of operations for the Academic Competition Federation, he received the 2007 N. Gordon Carper Lifetime Achievement Award for his services to the quizbowl community. Andrew is currently a law clerk to the Honorable James Ware, Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.