> I could knock on the doors of say Digipen or similar.

Seattle based? If so toss me your email or contact and I'll see if I can help you break into teaching if you're interested.

> What kind of PhD research did you do?

Assistive technology. I primarily worked with kids who had cleft lip and palate to improve their at-home speech therapy exercises. Trained some offline ASR models, built a therapy game, and automated metrics. I passed the research onto another student once I got my PhD, but the project lives on as https://spokeitthegame.com/