01 / Founder
Dr. Reginald Finley
Dr. Reginald Finley is a career educator, scientist, and technical trainer with more than three decades of experience in technology, science education, and community outreach. He is a US Army Veteran and has taught STEM subjects at the elementary, middle, high school, and university levels.
He currently works as a learning consultant with Siemens in industrial automation training, while teaching scientific literacy, doctoral-level statistics, and anatomy and physiology as a university instructor.
02 / Why this work
The case for the program
Across years of teaching, Dr. Finley repeatedly encountered students with obvious aptitude for engineering and computational thinking who had no access to the hardware that would let them prove it, to themselves or to anyone else. A coding lesson on a borrowed laptop is not the same as keeping a robot on your desk for a year. The Finley Robotics Initiative is built around that difference.
The choice of the Reachy Mini as the program's hardware is deliberate. It is open source. It is expressive. It is not a toy. It puts a real platform for AI experimentation into the hands of a student in the same form that a working engineer would meet it.
03 / Values
How we work
Curiosity and talent are not limited by geography or finances. Access often is. That is the part we can change.
The Initiative is intentionally small. We would rather select ten scholars and stand behind them than send a hundred kits and disappear. Honesty about scope, transparency about our nonprofit status, and rigor about outcomes are part of the work, not separate from it.
Read the full mission →
