Lise Gorelick is software engineer, yoga instructor and meditation teacher. At her day job, she works as a web developer for Microsoft. Outside of coding, Lise teaches chair yoga and meditation classes during lunchtime to her co-workers. She also co-facilitates a mindfulness program called “Mindful Growth” at Microsoft which teaches Microsoft employees about the scientifically backed benefits of mindfulness and trains them in cultivating a meditation practice.
In her early years, Lise struggled to reconcile her passions of technology and mindfulness – one pulling her to work at an elite tech company, and the other pulling her to go meditate in a monastery on a mountain. But lately, she has embraced her identity as a mindful technologist and is always looking for opportunities to bring a mindful mindset to engineering and bring her experience as a stressed-out engineer to help teach mindfulness to other engineers.
Ross Smith really enjoys getting a paycheck to “play” with software for 25 years now, over 20 at Microsoft. In September, 2014, he was nominated and accepted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. He is one of the authors of “The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention” and holds six patents. 42projects has aspired to promote cultural change, “bring buzz and laughter to the hallways”. He is a member of the leadership council for the Anita Borg Institute. He was also part of the organizing committee for TEDxSeattle, and has recently been working closely with iUrbanTeen.org and Spreeha.
In addition to his passion for creative techniques to improve the quality of the experience of using software, he’s explored organizational trust, enterprise gamification, management innovation, diversity and the future of education through games and with the Skype in the Classroom program. In December 2011, he was invited to the White House for a discussion on women in STEM. He was the keynote speaker for the American Road and Transportation Builder’s Transovation event in Fall 2014. The work of his teams have been mentioned in Forbes, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, PSFK, the American Journal of Play, Harvard Business Review, and the London School of Business. He is a blogger for the Society for Human Resource Management's SHRM Blog and regularly posts on management innovation. He is most excited by the current work on Skype Translator.
