The world changed. Education didn't.
Aidan Rubio started Plato+ after years in the classroom and the lab showed him the same thing: the way most students learn doesn't reflect what we know about how learning works, or how the world around them is changing.
How We Got Here
Where it started
Aidan started tutoring at 12 years old, working with kids from his neighborhood in Redwood City, many of them still learning English. What he remembers most isn't the lessons themselves. It's how the students, the other tutors, and the families around them became a community. In high school he worked with autistic children, volunteered at a memory care facility, and at sixteen joined an NIH research lab studying how chronic stress affects the developing brain. He was reading psychology on his own by then, not for school, but because he wanted to understand how people work.
Studying the brain from every angle
At UPenn, Aidan studied psychology with a minor in chemistry. His research and clinical work pulled him into biology, physics, and statistics, continuing to do science and education side by side. In the Changing Brain Lab he co-authored research showing that even preschool-aged children track their own improvement over time. He built a mentorship program for at-risk teens in Philadelphia and personally tutored over 75 students. While still at UPenn, he worked in Stanford's Heifets Lab, investigating the effect of psychotropic compounds on depression symptoms through a clinical trial.
Two worlds that shouldn't be this far apart
After UPenn, Aidan came back to the Bay Area. He took a clinical research fellowship under Dr. Quan Dong Nguyen at Stanford's Byers Eye Institute and started teaching biology at Everest Public High School, a Summit charter school. That's where things came into focus. He saw bright students and dedicated teachers, but a system that hadn't kept up with the world students are growing into. They couldn't engage with what they actually cared about, and the environment wasn't preparing them for what comes next. Plato+ started because Aidan wanted to build something that was: a place where learning is driven by curiosity, discovery, and depth.
One person can't do this alone. And shouldn't.
As more families found Plato+, Aidan began building a team around what matters most to him: educators who love what they do, who bring joy to the room, and who leave every student with a deeper understanding than when they walked in. Less than 1% of applicants are accepted.
Still researching. Still teaching.
Aidan is a perception scientist in Stanford's Roberts Vision Lab and the CEO of Plato+. The team now includes educators from Stanford, UPenn, UC Berkeley, and the University of Chicago, people who chose this work because they believe in it. Every family starts with a conversation with Aidan. Every student is matched with the educator best suited to how they think and what they want to achieve.
The Philosophy
Shaped by research and years of working directly with students.
Start with the person
Before we open a textbook, we want to know what makes a student curious, what frustrates them, and how they actually process things. The academics always follow from there.
Kids know when they're improving
Research from our founder's lab at UPenn showed that even preschoolers track their own performance over time. We don't lecture about effort. We build sessions where improvement is visible and felt.
Think in years
Not sessions. Not semesters. The best results come from a long-term relationship with someone who knows you, and that's what every educator on our team is trained to build.
Passion is the shortcut
Students who connect schoolwork to things they actually care about don't just get better grades. They develop the kind of drive that outlasts any individual class.
Researchers who teach
Not tutors who crammed the material last week. Our team includes published scientists, working clinicians, and people with doctoral-level training, who also happen to love being in the room with a student.
Use what the science says
Active recall. Spaced repetition. Metacognition. The research on effective learning is clear. Most of what students are told about "how to study" is decades out of date. We train every educator in methods that actually work.
"I saw great students and great teachers in a system that wasn't designed for either of them. I wanted to build something that was."
Every relationship starts with a conversation
No pressure, no hard sell. Just an honest look at where your student is and what might actually help.