Bold stories. Future focused.

Jessica Ochoa Hendrix, CEO of Killer Snails, has worked in K-16 education since 2003. Ochoa Hendrix was awarded the 2019 TED Residency, an in-house incubator within TED for breakthrough ideas and gave a TED talk on incorporating VR into the classroom. Ochoa Hendrix serves as the Principal Investigator for Small Business Innovation Research Grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Institute of Educational Sciences. Prior to co-founding Killer Snails, she most recently worked as an educational consultant whose clients included Relay Graduate School of Education and the Charter Network Accelerator. Previously, she worked for Uncommon Schools as the Director of Organizational Learning as the network grew from 16 to 32 schools. Ms. Ochoa Hendrix received her MBA with a concentration in Social Enterprise from Columbia Business School and was awarded the prestigious Board of Overseers Fellowship and the Nathan Gantcher Prize for Social Enterprise. Prior to business school, she worked in marketing for the Harvard Business Review and The Economist and taught for four years for The Princeton Review. She holds a BA from the University of Texas at Austin, is a proud alumna of Project Entrepreneur and serves as a member of the World Economic Forum's Expert Network in Future of Education, Gender and Work, Virtual and Augmented Reality and Entrepreneurship.

Jacquelyn Morie’s 30 years of researching & creating meaningful VR experiences includes multi-sensory techniques for VR that can predictably elicit emotional responses from participants. Her company All These Worlds, LLC is active in social VR, Mindfulness, storytelling & stress relief applications. In 2016 she concluded a project for NASA called ANSIBLE, a full virtual world ecosystem designed to provide psychological benefits for future astronauts who will undertake extremely long isolated missions to Mars. It was tested in the HISEAS analog facility in Hawaii, with a team of 6 scientists sequestered for a year to simulate the conditions of isolation on Mars, including long communications delays. She also investigates the use of personal avatars for how they affect our human selves. She invented a novel scent release device RemniScent, to aid in the evocative power of VR experiences.

Dr. Morie has advanced degrees in both Fine Art and Computer Science. Her career also spans exceptional accomplishments in education, developing digital media programs at the Ringling College of Art and Design, the University of Central Florida, the Walt Disney Animation Studios, VIFX, Blue Sky and Rhythm and Hues, and Otis College of Art and Design. She was instrumental in the creation of the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), where she served as a Senior Researcher for 14 years.

She is currently on the board of directors of several future-oriented immersive media companies, and is also a senior technical advisor to the XPRIZE’s ANA Avatar Prize, which challenges teams to create a robotic avatar people can inhabit from a distance. Her new 22-chapter book, co-edited with Kate McCallum, The Handbook of Research on the Global Impacts and Roles of Immersive Media, was published by IGI Global in early 2020.

Skip Rizzo is a clinical psychologist and Director of Medical VR at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. He is also a Research Professor with the USC Dept. of Psychiatry and School of Gerontology. Over the last 25 years, Skip has conducted research on the design, development and evaluation of Virtual Reality systems targeting the areas of clinical assessment, treatment, and rehabilitation across the domains of psychological, cognitive and motor functioning in both healthy and clinical populations. This work has focused on PTSD, TBI, Autism, ADHD, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and other clinical conditions. In spite of the diversity of these clinical R&D areas, the common thread that drives all of his work with digital technologies involves the study of how Virtual Reality simulations can be usefully applied to human healthcare beyond what’s possible with traditional 20th Century methods. To view some videos on his work, go to: https://www.youtube.com/user/AlbertSkipRizzo/videos