Mary Jepsen
Facebook/Oculus
Executive Director of Engineering | Head of Display Technology

Biography

Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen is one of the world’s foremost display innovators, with an exceptional track record of inventions paralleled by years of execution delivering breakthrough product with Asia’s largest manufacturers. Her recent work has been leading display and hardware development at Facebook / Oculus and at Google. She previously led the architecture and manufacture of the One Laptop Per Child “$100 laptop”, which transformed the lives of millions of children throughout the developing world, and catalyzed the creation of the low-cost laptop category called netbooks. She has co-founded 3 companies and served as CTO and/or CEO at all of them: MicroDisplay, OLPC and Pixel Qi. She is ranked in the top 50 female computer scientists of all time by the Anita Borg Institute; Time Magazine inducted her into its “Time 100” naming her one of the 100 most influential people in the world; CNN named her one of the top 10 thinkers in 2013. She is a frequent keynote and invited speaker, has a rich background in media arts, and has been featured widely in the popular press. She has authored ~100 scientific papers and has ~100 patents issued worldwide. She has a BS in Electrical Engineering and a BA in Art from Brown University, an MS in Holography from the MIT Media Lab, and a PhD in Optical Sciences from Brown University. She has served as a professor at both MITs: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge Mass at the Media Lab and the Royal Melbourne Inst of Technology (RMIT) in Melbourne Australia in Computer Science.