Thomas Howell | Co-founder and CEO

Thomas is a graduate of Yale University and co-founder and CEO of Forum. With a background in humanities, STEM, and test prep alike, Thomas has tutored extensively in all major subject areas in secondary education and with a range of students that is equally expansive: preteens and graduates, math whizzes and poets, high-schoolers and home-schoolers. Throughout this varied career, Thomas has remained devoted to his students and to tutoring as a profession. It is this devotion, furthermore, that led him to found Forum, which represents a better model for a tutoring agency—one that is better for families, better for tutors, and most of all, better for students.

In his role at Forum, Thomas Howell has established himself as a pioneer in the tutoring industry. Within Forum, Thomas oversees activity across the entire practice: from tutor recruitment, to program design and consulting, to the collection and organization of the industry's most comprehensive prep material database, to the creation of proprietary curricula and techniques, to the architecting and development of the Forum Lens, the leading standardized test scoring and reporting technology used by top tutoring agencies nationwide. He is an author and editor of the Forum Education Dispatch, a newsletter relied on by hundreds of families and consultants for academic guidance; a frequent counsel to partner agencies and leader of their professional development seminars; and a regular guest on panels covering academic advising. He also co-founded, and now advises, Plastic Labs, a research and product team that built Bloom, one of the first software tutors to utilize large language models, and the first to be built on research-backed theory of mind infrastructure.