About US
Our Founder
Martin Pieters is an innovator in business and education and applies his entrepreneurial skill to those industries. As the founder of CEO of DJMP Technology and Innovation Academy (djmptechacademy.org) founded in 2021, Martin has hosted and worked with several Fortune 500 companies, including Microsoft, Boeing, Facebook and Google.
As an educator, Martin is a Mathematics and Physical Science Professor at the City Colleges of Chicago- Kennedy King College, and an education specialist with both significant experiences in industry and education. Previously he was STEM Director for Rainbow PUSH - one of the leading civil rights national organization founded by the Rev Jesse L. Jackson Sr., who was appointed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
He has an entrepreneurial leaning and has successfully created several companies and managed several hundreds of million dollar budgets. His lengthy, progressively successful career in higher education and industry is rich with creative problem solving through innovative corporate and community partnerships, STEM program championing entrepreneurship training, and inter-institutional ventures. He is passionate about moving beyond familiar paradigms to empower adults to enhance their power to continuously learn, an essential component of individual success and company competitiveness.
Leveraging on his inter-institutional affiliation with both the Chicago City Colleges and the University of Chicago, Mr. Pieters completed a research fellowship at Northwestern University for 2022 in Deep-Learning Computer Vision Techniques for Analysis of Toughened Polymers with AI-based techniques.
He previously successfully pursued a research fellowship for the 2019-2020 academic year in the BME Department at IIT and Gifu University, Japan with a research focused on technical grant-supported research, and on engineering education/pedagogy incorporating A) and Machine Learning (ML) in clinical data processing for medical devices and imaging systems. The team leveraged Deep Neural Networks and decision making assisted by AI-based algorithms.
The transformative experience at UChicago, IIT, Northwestern University and CCC inspired him to create his own not for profit (501(c)3) DJMP Institute in 2021, dedicated to technology education for historically marginalized communities, particularly young girls of color. The group teaches an after-school tech curriculum, including lessons on robotics, virtual reality, and programming languages, and we couple that with a holistic program that involves both mentorship and exposure.