"Rachel Shadoan is the co-founder and CEO of Akashic Labs, a Portland-based research and development consultancy, where she specializes in combining research methodologies to provide rich and accurate answers to technology's pressing questions. Questions about people are her favorite kinds of questions to answer. Prior to founding Akashic Labs, she worked with Intel exploring both how people use their phones in cars and how the ability to convert to a tablet impacts laptop use. She has also collaborated with Stanford digital humanities scholars and Oxford data archivists to develop a visual graph query language to allow researchers to form queries on complex multi-dimensional data. Originally from Oklahoma, she holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Oklahoma, as well as an M.S. in Design Ethnography from the University of Dundee in Scotland. As is thematically appropriate for her adopted home of Portland, she likes cruciferous vegetables (especially kale) and occasionally brews beer."