Lauren Hayward Schaefer is a Staff Developer Advocate at Grammarly. She began her career as a software engineer for IBM, where she held various roles, including Full-Stack Developer, Test Automation Specialist, Social Media Lead, and Growth-Hacking Engineer. She went on to be a developer advocate at SugarCRM and MongoDB. She is a keynote speaker who is skilled in taking hard-to-understand topics and making them seem simple. Lauren holds a BS and MS in computer science from North Carolina State University and is the co-inventor of fourteen issued United States patents.