Jack Molisani, Keynote
Jack was a project officer in the Space Division of the United States Air Force before starting ProSpring Technical Staffing, an employment agency specializing in engineers, project managers, and technical writers and other content professionals.
Jack has a degree in Computer Engineering from Tulane University in New Orleans, is a Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication, and is the author of Be the Captain of Your Career: A New Approach to Career Planning and Advancement, which made Amazon’s top 10 career and resume bestseller list
Jack also produces The LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and Technical Communication Management, a yearly conference founded in 2002 to help companies increase revenue and decrease costs by solving content-related business problems.
Kristen Betts
Dr. Kristen Betts has over 20 years of experience in higher education serving in administrative roles at public, private, and for-profit institutions. Dr. Betts’s expertise is in online and blended learning, curriculum and instructional design, and evaluation. Her research focus is on innovative solutions to optimize educational and professional learning through balancing content, curriculum, and cognitive load in alignment with federal regulations. Dr. Betts is a Fulbright Specialist and international grant reviewer. She is also an author and invited keynote speaker nationally and internationally.
Lluís Cavallé
Lluís has spent more than 15 years working as a translator, interpreter, and proofreader. Technical documentation and localization were his main fields of expertise. This led him to start producing actual technical documentation. At some point, he realized he was doing more writing and editing than translating. So here he is, as a new hire in Red Hat as of last March, to help document products like Red Hat 3scale API Management. The best part of it is he can do it remotely in Barcelona, where he lives with his wife and two kids.
Darren Fennessy
Darren started as a web developer, spending 8 years in this role. He was creating documentation for his projects and loved the process. He began to seriously consider a career change to a technical writer. He made the jump to being a full-time technical writer 7 years ago and hasn’t looked back. He is now a technical writer working for Red Hat in Waterford City, in the beautiful sunny southeast of Ireland. He writes for the Red Hat 3scale API Management documentation to deliver the very best for all our customers.
John Garison
John Garison is Senior Lead Technical Communicator for Medidata Solutions. His experience in writing about operating systems, programming languages, business applications, and electronic health records (among other things) gives him a unique perspective on most things documentation-related. He delights in sharing information and war stories.
John is an STC Fellow and taught technical writing at Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Despite living on a dead-end dirt road in rural Vermont, his gigabit fiber optic internet lets him keep up with the real world and telecommute to New York City.
Anna Gasparyan
Anna is a product manager at JetBrains. Throughout her career in IT, she has worn many different hats from technical writer to development lead. She has been in technical writing for 15 years, has led multiple teams of technical writers in different companies, and her job as a product manager is still closely related to it, as her team is working on Writerside – a platform that applies the powers of developer tools to authoring documentation.
Steven Jong
Steven Jong is a lifelong technical communicator, a 40-year STC member, a Fellow of the Society, a former Board member, chair of the first Certification Commission, and winner of the 2018 President’s Award. Steve is currently Immediate Past President of the New England Chapter and a proud recipient of the DCSA and Landers/Carbrey Spirit of Volunteerism awards. Steve currently works as a Specialist Technical Writer at Hitachi Vantara, based out of Waltham, Mass.
Christina Mayr
Christina Mayr is a technical writer, information architect, outspoken user advocate, and champion for the technical writing profession. Currently leading a small team of technical writers in an IT organization within the gaming industry, Christina prides herself on leading and coaching others to improve their skills in technical communication. Her professional interests include technical content strategy, content operations, and leadership.
Selvaraaju Murugesan
Selvaraaju (Selva) Murugesan received the B.Eng. degree in Mechatronics Engineering (gold medalist) from Anna University in 2004 and his Ph.D. in Computational Mathematics from LaTrobe University, Australia. Selva is working as a Data Strategist at Kovai.co, a SaaS startup located in London. Selva is passionate about technical documentation, technical writing, data analytics, and artificial intelligence.
Smriti Rao
Smriti Rao is a Manager of Product Marketing at Red Hat. In her current role, Smriti leads the content and editorial team at developers.redhat.com, which produces over 150 pieces of niche developer content each quarter and reaches over 1.5 million developers annually. The site is a repository of tutorials, how-tos, and learning paths that enable developers to learn by doing.
Previously, Smriti worked in broadcast journalism and has extensive on-air news experience in India and with Bloomberg TV. Her work has been published in GQ and The Wall Street Journal, among other outlets. A graduate of Columbia University’s School of Journalism, Smriti also has an MBA from Georgia Tech and currently lives in Raleigh with her family.
When she’s not working, Smriti likes to watch Bravo and eat snacks, while scrolling endlessly on her phone.
Li-At Rathbun
Li-At Rathbun is an Israeli who “corrects Americans’ English for a living.” She has over 20 years of technical communication experience. For many of those years, she’s worked primarily as the technical editor in a Docs department that ballooned to over 30 writers.
In 2022, Li-At received a Manager Emeritus honor from the Technical Editing SIG. She also became STC Secretary, and she was inducted as an STC Fellow. Her Fellow citation is the first one published in a language other than English—in all of STC’s years.
In her free time, Li-At loves practicing and performing improv.
Jamye Sagan
As the Pharmacy Communication Advisor for H-E-B, Jamye helps design training programs and materials for various projects and initiatives within the pharmacy department. She also manages communications between the corporate office and the store pharmacies.
An Associate Fellow of STC, Jamye serves as President of the South Central Texas chapter and volunteers with the Instructional Design and Learning SIG as Treasurer. Jamye has also served at the Society level in various roles and has reviewed several publications for the Technical Communication journal.
Jamye lives in San Antonio, TX.
Christy Tucker
Christy Tucker is a learning experience design consultant with 20 years of experience helping people learn. She specializes in using scenario-based learning to engage audiences and promote skill transfer to real-world environments. She has created training for clients including the National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity (NAPE), Cisco, FIRST, and NAFSA: Association of International Educators. Christy has been blogging about instructional design and elearning for over 15 years and is a regular speaker at industry conferences and events.
Ann L. Wiley
Ann L. Wiley is a 39-year member of STC and the Rochester Chapter. Ann founded the Quality SIG in 1991 and has managed several other SIGs. She has been President of the Central New York chapter of STC and served as Spectrum conference manager for the Rochester Chapter three times. Ann has been editor of the Proof Sheet newsletter of the Rochester Chapter for many terms since 1989. Ann has an MSLS and Ph.D. in instructional development, both from Syracuse. She is President of Ann L. Wiley Consultants Inc. and has completed projects in lean and focused documentation, enterprise content management, process development, and communications. She is now focusing on docs as code. Ann is a Fellow of STC.