Management Team
Our management team is proud to have over 30 years of experience with Embark technologies.
David Mosher, President
David Mosher brings 25 years of development, product design, support, and program management experience to Embark. He has run three program offices at small, medium, and large companies as well as personally managing programs of hundreds of people worth hundreds of millions of dollars. David is excited to be in this role serving the higher education community especially after working at a public university for a number of years.
David Mosher was with Embark as the vice president of technology and operations and left soon after The Princeton Review acquired Embark. While at Embark, he rapidly improved the scalability of Embark's systems and dramatically improved the quality of service provided to clients. David previously worked at Pyramid Technology for eleven years where he built the world's most scalable and reliable systems. In addition, David was credited with bringing Embark to profitability prior to the TPR acquisition through his experience with operations, program management, and cost accounting. Most recently, David was Director of Analytics at PGP Corporation—which provides data privacy protection to a million users worldwide—where he built a state of the art metrics and financial dashboard system to provide real time information to the management team.
David has an MBA from Santa Clara University and a computer science degree from the University of California, Berkeley. David has a son in college and another son who will be starting to prepare for college in a couple of years.
Cecil Foster, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer
Cecil joins the Embark family as the executive vice president and chief operating officer after a very successful career in the Higher Education and non-profit sectors.
Most recently, Cecil served as the Assistant Vice President of Enrollment Services at the University of South Dakota. In this position, he oversaw the Admission, Financial Aid, and Registrars functions of the University. Cecil also served on the USD Executive Committee and Presidents Advisory Council where he developed state of the art scholarship matrices, enrollment forecasting models and implemented new reporting structures. Cecil increased enrollment by 10.6 percent in a short two year period.
In addition to USD, Cecil's professional career in education has covered Daemen, Canisius , and D'Youville Colleges. While at Daemen, Cecil served as the Director of Admissions and pioneered a theory now known as "The 24 hour Admissions Office" that makes use of the most innovative technology in higher education today. The use of best practices and ground breaking theories resulted in an 11.5 percent increase in enrollment over a two year period.
Cecil's impact in enrollment management was made even more remarkable by the fact that both Daemen and USD saw amazing results in the face of declining student populations. At both schools, Cecil used Embark as his primary admissions software.
Prior to his roles in education, Cecil Co-founded the K.I.D.S Development Project in 1997, a non-profit organization that provides youths with an opportunity to attend summer camp outside of Buffalo, NY. For this work he was recognized by the state of New York, Erie County legislature for his outstanding achievements and contributions to the students of Erie County and Western New York.
Grant Joung, Vice President of Technology
Grant has been with Embark since 1997. Since joining Embark, he has played a key role in the architecture and software development of its flagship products including Apply Online, Application Manager, and Admissions Center. As Grant's role expanded into technology as a whole, he helped establish a fully redundant and scalable data center, meeting Sarbanes-Oxley compliancy, spanning over 200 production and development servers across three locations.
As the associate vice president of development/technology with The Princeton Review, Grant was responsible for all software development within the Admissions Services division, including the Embark product line and The Princeton Review website, which welcomes over 1M new registered users every fall. Grant graduated magna cum laude with honors from Boston University with a degree in computer science and a minor in psychology. He enjoys traveling with his wife whom he also met at Embark his first year working there.
John Yamasaki, Vice President of Product and Operations
Yama means "mountain" in Japanese.
A San Francisco native.
A passion for technology and the web, but has a bigger heart for 3 C's (Colleagues,
Clients, Community).
Values communication and relationships, and respects using technology to bridge
the gap.
Following his studies in Psychology at San Francisco State, Yama served in the non-profit sector for several years, including serving as Director of Youth Ministries at Cameron House, a Chinatown-based multi-service agency serving Asian communities in the San Francisco Bay Area with a focus on leadership development and community service for children, youth and families - ask him about singing "Little Cabin in the Woods."
Yama joined Embark in 1999, and played various management positions in web development, project management, client services and support, and product management. Throughout his years at Embark, he continues to be inspired in finding new ways of connecting with people through technology, and has an enthusiastic appreciation for the people behind it - from deans and IT directors to interns and developers.
Yama enjoys practicing Muay Thai with his co-workers (whenever they are all not busy in the office), and playing riffs on his guitar, which he keeps in the office. He also looks forward to his next trip to Japan with his wife, Miki, and son, Ren.
Christopher Simpson, Vice President of Client Services
Chris Simpson was most recently Embark's director of client services, responsible for managing and growing Embark's client base. He began at Embark as the director of product and project management and led the design and development of many product enhancements, including Dynamic Online Recommendations as well as designing and developing the initial integration between the Application Manager, Prospect Manager, Event Scheduler, and Interview Scheduler products.
Prior to joining Embark, Chris enjoyed a 10-year career with Providian Financial, one of the nation's top consumer loan companies. He held multiple management roles in the Test Center, an Operations Marketing facility. He developed and launched one of the nation's first Smart Credit Cards in the U.S. marketplace. He was also Director of Customer Management Systems, responsible for managing service upgrade programs and Membership Products systems generating more than $1B in revenue. Chris earned a B.A. of Economics with a concentration in Psychology from Ithaca College in Ithaca, NY.
He also volunteers his time as a member of The Guardsmen, a San Francisco non-profit organization devoted to advancing at-risk Bay Area youth by funding indoor and outdoor educational programs.
