I look forward to meeting students in Winthrop, especially those who are budding entrepreneurs.  I am a tech entrepreneur and a perennial student.  Bob Doris, my business partner (and much later, my husband) and I started a company (Sonic Solutions) with a third partner in an apartment in San Francisco. We bootstrapped it and took it public; we had 1000+ employees scattered around the world when made a successful exit. At Sonic, we specialized in complex digital media applications. If you’ve played a DVD (or recorded one on your computer), the chances are that it was authored using our technology. If you listen to music recorded before 1986 (the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, Motown hits, classic jazz, and so on), it was most likely was “de-noised” through our audio signal processing algorithms to make it more listenable on digital formats.

After our company was acquired, I went to Stanford to get a master’s degree for fun. I graduated in 2018 and wrote a thesis on a topic that greatly interests me: how Renaissance paintings express important economic trends of that era. This recent WSJ Piece about the impact of early Renaissance technology was based on one of my thesis chapters. In 2020, I was a fellow in the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative and a senior fellow in 2022.  Bob and I are members of the Dean’s Cabinet of the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and have worked on task forces focusing on post-Covid student life, ethical AI, summer internships, technology translation, and more.  My most important Harvard connection is our daughter Annie (a Quincy Penguin), who graduated in 2022.

I hail from St. Louis, MO and attended Washington University.  After receiving an MBA from The Wharton School at Penn, I worked as a management consultant at Touche Ross (now Deloitte) and Arthur D. Little. Later, at Lucasfilm, I was the head of sales and marketing for the Computer Division and the nascent Pixar group. 

Bob and I love the adventure of sailing. As in business, you never know what might happen…like catching a large tuna in the open sea off Sardinia!