Presenters

Andrew Bauer is a UI Developer at Boston University, integrally involved in the management of our multi-network, multi-site platform. Andrew is a theme and plugin developer, also a WordPress core contributor. On a day-to-day basis, he is either mocking up a new interface somewhere, tinkering in one of our 200+ plugins and themes, or digging through analytics to see how we can improve our service. Andrew is also an avid skier, although it's been terrible year for that up in Boston!

Jason Berg is a Director at Pixo who oversees the business development and project management teams. Pixo partnered with UIC in 2015 to redesign and relaunch www.UIC.edu using a novel WordPress setup that provides flexible, re-usable components. Pixo's work is based in PatternLab, an open source tool for creating style guides using atomic design. Those flexible WordPress components and the new campus branding are now providing the foundation for a new WordPress multi-site so that all campus units can leverage the templates, new branding and tools without reinventing the wheel.

I’m a full-time freelancer developer living in South Florida (Miami/Ft. Lauderdale area). I am a WordPress developer and specialize in BuddyPress sites/applications. I also do stand-alone PHP work. I’m also a speaker, meetup organizer, conference organizer and father of three.

David Brattoli has worked in higher education for the past 3 years. Along with this experience he has been running his own web and graphic design company “Infinite Reality LLC” since 2007. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Bluffton University and associate degrees in graphic and web design and gaming and simulation design from Lorain County Community College. He is also self-taught in a host of different coding languages and has integrated my mathematics, graphic and web design skills to accomplish whatever web design tasks he needs to solve. Utilizing this knowledge allowed him to give clients a powerful and unique set of websites for industry, government education, and learning environments.

Originally from the Jacksonville (FL) area, Ryan is a queer and non-binary feminist, educator, and activist. Ryan’s pronouns are they/them or he/him. Since 2005 he has worked in education technology, with a primary focus on supporting and maintaining WordPress networks. Ryan builds community and helps faculty and students create positive environments for learning. He also agitates to make higher education a safer space for marginalized people.

Jonathan Brinley has been building WordPress websites and plugins for ten years, taking the plunge into full-time freelancing shortly thereafter. He has collaborated with the distributed team at Modern Tribe for five years to build delightful and creative solutions on top of the WordPress platform. When he’s not coding, Jonathan is busy homeschooling his two children and enjoying the beautiful weather of Northeast Florida.

Bruce Caraway teaches in the Computer and Information Technology Department at Lone Star College. His course topics include general computing, computer programming, web programming and WordPress.

When Bruce isn't teaching WordPress to his students he is helping  fellow instructors in using WordPress to develop their own faculty web site.

Bruce also provides one-on-one WordPress coaching to external clients.

Kimberly Charles is Director of Digital Communications for the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has a 16-year track record of bringing shared templates and tools to UIC websites and facilitating learning and information sharing sessions for Web professionals across campus. Kim and her staff are responsible for a campus-wide WordPress multi-site that already supports more than 200 sites. In 2015, she led the roll-out of a new campus branding system across multiple digital platforms, including the relaunch of the campus homepage, www.UIC.edu. The new UIC homepage uses WordPress with a set of re-usable components and templates that are now being made available in a multi-site platform for other campus units. Kim continues to lead the charge at UIC for campus-level tools that help raise the bar for all aspects of UIC's web presence.

Mike is a web developer with over 15 years of experience. Currently, he works at Carleton University where a small team and he manage 250+ WordPress sites. When he's not up to his neck in code or banging his head against his desk, he enjoys playing music and jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.

Sarah has worked in multiple areas of higher education from student services at a community college to student life at a large university. Currently, she works as the Associate Director of Academic & Faculty Affairs at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee, where this amazing conference is being held! Part of her role is to oversee curricular changes and their academic catalog, which they transitioned from a pdf into an awesome website.

Chris is a web dev, and he has been for close to 20 years. He was webmaster for a collectibles company, then for a hospital, then for a university.  Now he's Director of Digital Technology for a light therapy company called Quasar Bio-Tech.  All along the way he's freelanced like crazy, doing everything from social media management to custom CMSs and some fun WordPress plugins. He loves coding, he loves his wife and four year old, and he loves making music!

Paul Gilzow is the lead programmer for the Division of Marketing and Communications at the University of Missouri, where he has worked as a web applications programmer since 2005. Certified by the SANS Institute in web application security, Paul frequently works with campus IT security to deliver presentations to fellow developers and assists in triaging and cleaning up compromised WordPress sites on campus.

Shawn Hooper is the CTO at Actionable Books, where he enjoys combining code and data to build intelligent tools for teams and leaders. Hailing from Ottawa, Canada, Shawn has been building web applications since the late 90s, with a focus on WordPress since 2011. As a freelance developer, he built sites for clients in the public and private sectors in both Canada and United States. He loves making use of great 3rd party APIs, promoting web accessibility and secure coding practices.

Kiera Howe a software coder, entrepreneur/business owner, instructor, problem solver, explorer of all things new in tech. She builds things, she breaks things (then fixes them), and more.  She’s been an owner of businesses in the computer/internet industry since 2005.  Kiera has written code in over a dozen computer languages and built software from games to business web applications.

Kiera has been using WordPress since 2007, and, more recently, she’s been teaching web design at Sheridan College using WordPress as a platform. She’s has built a number of plugins and widgets for internal use by students and faculty.

Outside of teaching, Kiera is a freelance software developer for her own company Wiley Solutions.  She builds custom software solutions, mostly in the area of business intelligence (reporting, automation, etc.)

Shelley Keith has been building websites long enough to remember when Angelfire was rad and the capitalization of HoTMaiL was clever. She's survived the Dot Bomb, the advent of the "blog" and the days when every small business client was sure they could clone eBay, only just for Beanie Babies (or car parts, or Magic cards or whatever), and make a MINT. A mint I say. She launched WPMU as the university CMS in 2009 as manager of web communications and marketing at Southern Arkansas University before moving into her current role as director of digital communications for the WordPress entrenched University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Keith has a bachelor of business administration from Southern Arkansas University, a master of science in information quality from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and is a 2013 graduate of the HighEdWeb Leadership Academy.

I'm a lead interactive designer in Boston University's Interactive Design department, and I love code, design and teaching others. I'm maybe the only person on this earth that gets excited to write documentation, and I'm an active contributor to our custom theme framework. I frequently work with large school redesigns (most recently, BU's College of Communication), as well as work on feature articles for our Bostonia and Research editorial properties.

Stephanie is a full-time WordPress consultant. Prior to striking out on her own, she worked for the Texas A&M University Writing Center, the Texas A&M System Offices, and  the Texas A&M Health Science Center. She still does consulting work for Texas A&M and other institutions of higher education.

She's pretty active in the web design community, mostly in CSS, standards, accessibility, WordPress and higher ed. She was on the programming committee for the HighEdWeb conference from 2006 until 2009.

Her third book, Content Strategy for WordPress, was released in April 2015. This book is for site owners of all backgrounds, not just web developers.

Alexandra Martines is an Instructional Technology Specialist for Smith College and a freelance WordPress web designer. By day, she writes documentation, consults with faculty on educational technology, and provides tech skills workshops for students, faculty and staff. By night, she designs WordPress sites for area businesses, teaches clients to manage their own site and works on SEO. Her particular interests are in Open Educational Resources, iPads in higher education and media literacy education to prevent digital disenfranchisement.

Shanta is an IT, web design and social media consultant and an instructor in web design and capstone project at Sheridan College. She is also a principal in Web Weapons, specializing in web development, business intelligence and educational training.

She is a problem solver and has been said to have the patience of a saint. She can explain even the most difficult concepts to the most basic user and has developed training documents that allow clients to learn for themselves. She thrives on understanding the needs of my clients and believes in making social media as simple as possible and making it fun, which allows our clients to seamlessly incorporate it into their organization.

Shanta holds a Certificate in Business Management and a Bachelor of Commerce Degree from Ryerson University in Information Technology Management. Some of her volunteer activities include being the Alumni Advisor for the Women In Information Technology Management program at Ryerson University, Technical Advisor for the Malvern Red and Black Society and Assistant Instructor at the Canadian Martial Arts Centre.

Megan O'Neill is a software engineer that works primarily with Ruby on Rails, and WordPress applications. She has been programming since 2014, after completing General Assembly's Web Development Immersive. She works for the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at Columbia University, where she deals with the intersection of code and scholarly content.

Kerri O’Connell is a project manager at the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS), Columbia University Library/Information Services. She has a MSLIS from Pratt Institute, which she received in 2013. She has been employed at CDRS since she graduated from Pratt, working primarily with the journals publication program.

Todd is a full-time, tenure track assistant professor at Middle Tennessee State University and is the coordinator of the New Media Communication concentration in the College of Media and Entertainment at MTSU. He has taught at the college level since 1989.

Before beginning his full time teaching career in 2012 Todd worked in “industry" as a corporate video producer and B2B/B2C interactive multimedia producer before moving to the web in 1994. In 1998 he began working for a Fortune 200 financial services firm as a web producer and was business manager for the acquisition, implementation and operations of an enterprise level web content management system. In 2007 he left working “For the Man" to start a web communications consulting practice working with small businesses and non-profits. He founded and ran a coworking space from 2009 to 2011 and was the licensee and an organizer of TEDxSanAntonio from 2009 to 2012. Yes, he likes long walks on the beach but also bicycling, woodworking and binge watching.

Director of User Experience at idfive in Baltimore, I help large organizations solve some of their most difficult problems — to define and create great digital experiences and software through usability research, sketching studios, IA concept models and prototypes of all fidelities. I’ve concepted business-critical products for Yahoo, US Army, T. Rowe Price and more — unearthing hairy workflow inefficiencies and audience engagement hurdles. Today, I’m helping our higher education clients remain relevant in a digital world where free and cheap training venues are diversifying competition. I’m co-author of an in-progress book on the future of higher education, expected to be published in the summer of 2016.

Complementary to business hours, you’ll find me spread across regional events and conferences — teaching IA/UX graduate students, evangelizing accessibility and promoting my favorite open source projects like WordPress. When I'm not doing responsible adult things, I grow the world's hottest chili peppers and bottle my own hot sauce. I’d divulge something funny from my past, but these days the internet does a better job of surfacing our embarrassing moments; find me anywhere by Googling “anthonydpaul.”

Shelly Peacock has been in sales and graphic design since 2001, moving focus to include social media management in 2007. She built her first WordPress site in 2009 — as a way to make her designs “do stuff,” and as a portfolio for her art business. Shucked it all to run The SpinBird Group, a WordPress consulting and design business. She specializes in communication, design and project management. She likes short walks on the beach, cabanas and shooting opossums off her back deck with her shotgun.

Mantra: Life is short- GET #FIERCE WITH IT.

Hi I'm Shane. I'm the CEO at Modern Tribe Inc. We get to work with some of the worlds top companies (SAP, MTV, Bon Appetit, eBay, Microsoft…) and higher education (MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, UCSF…). Beyond services, we are committed to open source and our plugins are pushing five million downloads. The events calendar has evolved into a multi-million dollar freemium plugin business.

Before Modern Tribe, I was educational director at a private learning institution, and taught both in public and private settings for a number of years.

Steve Persch is a developer with 10 years of experience building WordPress and Drupal sites. When he was interning at a theatre company in college, he overheard the artistic director say they needed a blog and an online magazine. He volunteered to build them. WordPress 2.0.4 got the job done. His path was changed, and he's been building sites since. Most of his professional experience is in Drupal, and he has insights on the common challenges in both communities. He now works as an Agency and Community Engineer at Pantheon.

Josh, is a WordPress plugin developer, educator and entrepreneur. He is the owner of CalderaWP, makers of Caldera Forms, and a co-founder of Ingot, the easiest A/B testing solution for WordPress. In addition he is a contributor to WordPress core, the WordPress REST API and plugins by Foo Plugins, Postmatic, Pods, Aesop Interactive, WordImpress, GravityView and more.

One of Josh’s favorite things to do is to share what he has learned about WordPress plugin development, business and community. He writes regularly for Torque Magazine and has contributed to other top WordPress tutorial sites including, Smashing Magazine, Tuts+, and WPBeginner. He is also the author of the book The Ultimate Guide to the WordPress REST API.

I have worked in higher ed for the past 17 years. I've been with the website almost exclusively those 17 years. While my training is in graphic design, I've taught myself web design and development along with a host of different languages to accomplish whatever problems I've needed to solve. Outside of my professional life, I've spent the last 17 years married to my wonderful, talented wife. Together we have two girls, a 15-year-old in her first year of high school, and a 5-year-old who can't wait to start her kindergarten year later this fall.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a senior staff author at Lynda.com, a LinkedIn Company, with 60+ courses published and an audience of over 300,000. When not creating training materials for Lynda.com, Morten teaches Instructional Design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, co-organizes the Vancouver WordPress Meetup Group, and contributes to WordPress core and community projects. In his spare time he reads sci-fi and philosophy, tries to find time to play guitar, and wears out his dance shoes on the ballroom floor.

Erica Reifer is a New York based designer and educator with an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons The New School for Design. Erica began her career in the film industry and transition to education design by way of information and web design, with an emphasis on user experience and interaction. In collaboration with Tufts University, she designed an online learning environment specifically aimed to support and improve the Family Medicine Residency program. In 2010, she was awarded the Open Society Institute and Parsons Fellowship in Information Design. Currently, Erica is pursuing her PhD in Educational Communication Technology at New York University and works as a Senior Educational Technologist (also at NYU), where she provides ways for faculty to effectively marry the technology and pedagogy to enhance their teaching and learning.

Cliff is a Lead UX Engineer at Pardot, a Salesforce company — a leader in B2B marketing automation — where he is the resident WordPress developer. He’s passionate about keeping people at the heart of UX, and will design, code and research to make it happen.

He’s the co-founder of multiple profitable side projects, such as Evermore and TuneDig. He co-organizes amUX, a morning meetup focused for local UXers. He’s an accomplished speaker who’s given talks around the world. He’s also been developing with WordPress for many years, contributes back into the community and participates in WordCamps.

Cliff lives with his wife, April, in Atlanta, where he can be found at a concert, cycling around the city, or playing guitar.

Kasandrea Sereno is a higher education advisor and consultant.

She is a Twitter addict, lover of Pinterest and Instagram, and often posts cool links on her Tumblr and ScoopIt. She enjoys photography, blogging and meeting cool people who want to do big things. You can see Kasandrea's work on SlideShare or Prezi.

Kasandrea is fond of Chipotle, vanilla lattes and traveling (although not necessarily in that order). She has an allergy to incompetence and a drive to make things bigger and better. Life is too short to be anything less than awesome. She is a parent to the cutest pup on the planet and an aggressively affectionate polydactyl cat.

Kasandrea is passionate about education in all forms and encourages others to achieve their dreams. She has a company where she gets to help people go to college, and it is her favorite position by far. She also enjoy helping businesses recognize their strengths and mitigate/eliminate their weaknesses through properly leveraging their human capital. Her current research includes social media marketing and using current technologies to market and promote educational institutions and companies.

Neel Shah is an entrepreneur and developer with 7 years of experience developing websites and custom solutions for businesses and their online presence. He is currently working as IT Specialist and Technical Lead for NYU’s Web Publishing service which offers WordPress to faculty, staff and students for educational use case. He has been keen with automation since past few years and has been developing automated processes to assist users with their repetitive tasks. One of which is the WordPress Site Setup Wizard Plugin. He is also actively involved with the startup community and is passionate about solving problems in healthcare management when available.

Elaine Shannon is not just a web developer, she loves to look at the whole picture: design, development, content, SEO, user experience, A/B testing and analytics. She first learned about WordPress in 2007 and has been using and recommending it ever since. In her current role, she manages St. Mary’s University’s main website and a handful of microsites, always experimenting with ways to make the web a better place.

Inder Singh is a Senior Web Developer at Boston University. He has been working at BU for 5 years and mainly works on the central WordPress installation (and its themes and plugins) on a daily basis at work. He helps manage over 2000 sites in WordPress at the same time using a shared repository of themes and plugins. Other than WordPress, Inder has also worked on Django, iOS and Amazon AWS. He also likes to travel, play basketball and soccer, dance Bhangra and eat food for fun. 🙂

Malik Singleton trains higher education faculty in best ways to use technology in their courses. His work with NYU IT involves WordPress, instructional media, classroom technologies and learning management systems. Malik also teach grad-level students data-driven reporting at CUNY Journalism. He has worked previously in online news media and in web development. Now Malik applies that experience to education technology.

Roy Sivan is a WordPress developer and has been using WordPress since version 0.7. He has worked all over the place, but currently works for Disney writing code for WordPress and other web applications.

Adam Soucie is a WordPress developer and the CEO of Dinosaur Iceberg, an Orlando-based digital creative agency.  He is also a member of the WordPress Orlando organizing team, the speaker coordinator for WordCamp Orlando and a member of the WordPress Accessibility Team.

Donna Talarico is an independent creative professional and the founder/publisher of Hippocampus Magazine. Before going solo, from 2010 to 2015, she was the director of integrated communications at Elizabethtown College. Donna, a resident of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, speaks regularly at higher education, technology and publishing conferences and events, and she has been published in a variety of print and online newspapers, magazines and industry/affinity publications, including CASE Currents, Guardian Higher Education Network and Wiley's Recruiting and Retaining Adult Learners. Prior to higher education, Donna worked in eCommerce and radio. She has an MFA in creative writing from Wilkes University and an MBA from Elizabethtown College.

Chris is a Senior Web Engineer for 10up and has been working on WordPress since 2008. Before joining 10up Chris built one of the largest security plugins in the WordPress community as well as numerous other plugins and solutions. When not coding Chris loves to teach and has presented at numerous WordCamps and other conferences as well as taught computer security for St. Edward’s University and other University courses ranging from computers to aviation.

Dave has taught accessibility to faculty, staff and graduate students, and he was a founding member for accessibility at University of Georgia (UGA). He teaches web design and form building, and he is a web developer for the Office of Research Communications. He manages 138 WordPress based websites. He has been at UGA for 21 years.