Dr. Natalie Lao is the Executive Director of the App Inventor Foundation. As Executive Director of the App Inventor Foundation, Natalie’s mission is to empower anyone, anywhere, of any age to create meaningful technologies that can transform their lives and the lives of people around them. She fell in love with App Inventor when she discovered it teaching high school computer science, and saw its power to rapidly transform students from passive consumers of technology into active creators of it. She joined the MIT App Inventor lab as an undergraduate research assistant during her studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she received her B.S., M.Eng., and Ph.D. in EECS and AI. Her research on AI and CS education has been featured by MIT News and UNESCO.