About Jessica

Contact Information

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Short Biography

I was born in Butte, Montana, USA, a small American mining town in the southwest of "Big Sky Country". A few years after I was born, my family moved the opposite corner of the country, Jacksonville, Florida, the largest city in land mass situated on one of the few north-flowing rivers in the world, the St. Johns River. It was here I grew up, studying hard at Stanton College Preparatory School, playing in the rivers, beaches, and lakes in the hot, humid weather, and dreaming of the million things I wanted to be when I grew up.

My academic career began at The University of Arizona. It was in the beautiful deserts of Tucson, Arizona that I earned a Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science and a Bachelor's in Arts in Spanish. During this time I also studied and lived for six months in one of Europe's largest and liveliest cities, Madrid, Spain, attending Estudio Sampere Spanish Language Institute.

After completing my Bachelor's degrees, I took a great opportunity to intern at a very young Google (at that time it had existed for less than two years and was not yet publicly traded). Afterwards, I again turned toward the academia to pursue a PhD at the University of Washington in the beautifully liberal and liberally beautiful city of Seattle, Washington. While in Seattle, I was an intern and then contractor for a very cool engineering team at a leading computer science research organization, Microsoft Research. I also spent over two years in the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab -- a team of researchers who are pushing the envelope and investigating difficult questions concerning the intersection of technology, design, and ethics. In 2003, I completed a Master's degree in Computer Science at the University of Washington.

After making the difficult decision to take leave from the PhD, I took a much need "career break" by completing a teacher's training certificate from Sivananda Yoga in South India and traveling in Latin America.

I am currently working and living in Dublin, Ireland working as a software developer for an Irish eCommerce company called Buy4Now.