Karen Holtzblatt is the founder of the Women in Tech Retention Project and creator of the @Work Action Framework for understanding women’s experience at work and interventions to help companies and individuals. She is also the co-founder and CEO of InContext Design and the visionary behind InContext’s unique customer-centered design approach, Contextual Design. Karen has been recognized as a leader in requirements and design for pioneering transformative ideas and design approaches throughout her career.

Karen holds a doctorate in applied psychology from the University of Toronto, is the author of Contextual Design 2nd Edition Design for Life, and has received numerous accolades for her work, including the CHI Academy Lifetime Award for Practice and honors from the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI). She is a research scientist at the University of Maryland.