After teaching for fourteen years at U.C. Berkeley and U.C. Davis, Jeffrey Neil founded ExecuTutor.  His interest in education began at The Hotchkiss School where he graduated as part of the Centennial Class and went on to receive a BA from Yale University.  He worked in finance as a project manager and then co-founded an international apparel company, Icarus.  After much soul searching, he decided to return to education and earned an MA from the Graduate Theological Union, an M.Phil from the University of Cambridge (King's College), and finally a PhD from U.C. Berkeley.  ExecuTutor brings together his passion for entrepreneurship with his commitment to education and self-realization.

Our Story

Dr. Neil grew up between the East Coast and the Caribbean.  His exposure to different languages and cultures at a young age, as well as the difficulties assimilating to each new country, made him especially sensitive to the importance of effective communication and acculturation.  He began his coaching by mentoring undergraduates at Berkeley and then getting more involved helping international students adjust to the academic challenges of an American university.  Always a champion of intensive one-on-one tutoring, he began to accept requests for tutorials outside his university from students and executives.  Since then, he has helped many foreign executives to get placed in corporate jobs throughout the U.S.  Dr. Neil has assisted students from all over the world to get into top colleges and boarding schools.  

Dr. Neil leads seminars in writing for all of The New York Times contests, including the Summer Reading Contest, Review Contest, STEM Contest, and Editorial Contest. Nine of his workshop participants were selected as Runners Up or received Honorable Mentions in the summer of 2020; one of his students won the contest in 2020. He teaches creative writing classes in poetry, playwriting, fiction, and personal essay for the Scholastics contest. In 2021, half of all of his students received an Honorable Mention, Silver Key, or Gold Key award—an unrivaled proportion of winners compared to other writing teachers for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.    

Dr. Neil has consulted with TAL Education, the largest educational corporation in the world, on various projects. In 2018, he piloted an innovative program in the humanities for gifted secondary school students on their Beijing campuses. Exposing students to comparative literature, public speech and debate, film studies, and writing, the interdisciplinary course was unprecedented in China. In 2020, Dr. Neil collaborated on a complete program of pre-recorded videos and written study materials for both of Cambridge University’s English language assessment exams, the KET (A2 Level) and PET (B1 Level). He developed a recorded series in journalism, film, and literature focused on critical thinking for students admitted early to Asia’s #1 university, Tsinghua University through TAL-Tsinghua. He also narrated and edited TAL’s ESL series based on illustrated and dramatically performed children’s fairy tales.

As a Business Language and Cultural Communications trainer at Learnship and Realogy’s relocation branch, Cartus, Dr. Neil has worked with international employees on two Google campuses, 345 Spear Street and Youtube, San Bruno, and at Chevron. He has expertise in teaching adult professionals how to read, write, and speak in various situations inside and outside the workplace.