Roman has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stony Brook and an AB from Harvard and has been teaching college students for a decade and a half. He has been teaching the GRE since getting perfect scores on both sections.

Roman has taught plenty of things besides the GRE—the nature of evil, feminist theory, medieval philosophy—but his favorite class is on existentialism. He writes arcane papers on philosophy of action, about which he has edited a book, and on philosophy of death, which he insists is much more fun to study than it sounds (everything becomes less morbid when it’s more abstract).

He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, and when he isn’t grading papers or preparing lectures, they like to visit museums and walk around random cities; it’s surprising how many you can find scattered all over the place if you can escape New York’s orbit. His most obsessive hobby involves sampling craft beer, which may be the greatest aesthetic achievement of our time.