Laura Anne Bilodeau Overdeck is an American maths education entrepreneur and philanthropist. Overdeck is the founder and president of Bedtime Math, a nonprofit that seeks to bring recreational math to children through their parents.
After completing her education, Overdeck held positions at D.E. Shaw & Co. and at Stanford Research Institute. Overdeck founded the nonprofit Bedtime Math in 2012, sending out playful nightly math posts for children to solve with their parents. The blog received early critical acclaim, and the following year she published Bedtime Math: A Fun Excuse to Stay Up Late, her first of four books with Feiwel & Friends, an imprint of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group. Subsequently, the Bedtime Math team created an app version of the offering; University of Chicago researchers found that app usage increased children’s math skills by an extra three months in one school year, publishing the results in Science. Overdeck has published opinion pieces on children’s math education in TIME Magazine, Huffington Post, USA Today, the Houston Chronicle, and Quartz. Overdeck serves as a trustee at Princeton University and is vice chair of the board of trustees at the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey. She also serves on the advisory boards of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth and Khan Academy.
Awards
Overdeck was named Educator of the Year by the New Jersey R & D Council in 2017. In 2019 she was the commencement speaker at Stevens Institute of Technology, where she also received an honorary doctorate.
Philanthropy
In 2011, Overdeck and her husband established the Overdeck Family Foundation, an organization that funds educational research and STEM education. The foundation's overall goal is to enable all American children to unlock their potential by strengthening learning in and out of school. The Overdecks’ education philanthropy focuses on four key issue areas: “early impact,” “exceptional educators,” “innovative schools,” and “inspired minds.” They have made gifts to Robin Hood Foundation for work by MDRC to study the long-term effects of various early childhood programs. The Overdecks have also supported the Harlem Children's Zone with its early impact strategy and the Khan Academy. Other grantees have included the NJ STEM Teaching Fellowship, and Governor’s School for the Sciences at Drew University in New Jersey. Overdeck is an alumna of Governor’s School and was instrumental in saving the program through private donations in 2006. In October 2018, The Overdeck Education Innovation Fund gifted $1 million to be distributed over the next three years by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs for research on education issues. This is the second gift from the Overdeck Family Foundation, the first of which was $1 million donated in 2016. That same month, the Overdeck Family Foundation pledged $3 million to Opportunity Insights, a policy and research institute based at Harvard University that will publish data on the probability that children will escape poverty based on where they were raised.
