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Speaker Index

As an agile coach with BootStrap Agile, and co-founder of e-learning publisher Development Knowledge, Steve Adolph pursues his passion for helping organizations get the job done. Steve has been creating and managing software development projects long enough to remember FORTRAN and PDP-11s. His professional career includes many exciting and critical projects—designing call processing software for digital telephone exchanges, design and development of leading edge network management systems, railway signaling, and telecom billing.

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Editor-in-chief of CM Crossroads and author of Configuration Management Best Practices: Practical Methods that Work in the Real World, Bob Aiello is a consultant and software engineer specializing in software process improvement, including software configuration and release management. He has more than twenty-five years of experience as a technical manager at top New York City financial services firms, where he held company-wide responsibility for configuration management.

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Sanjiv Augustine is an industry-leading agile and lean expert, author, speaker, management consultant, and trainer. He is the president of LitheSpeed, an agile consulting, training, and product development company. For more than twelve years, Sanjiv has managed agile projects from five to more than 100 people, trained thousands of agile practitioners through workshops and conference presentations, and coached numerous project teams.

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LitheSpeed

Arlen Bankston is an established leader in the application and evolution of process management methodologies such as lean, Six Sigma and BPM, as well as agile software development processes such as Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum. He is a lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and Certified ScrumMaster Trainer. He also has twelve years of experience in product design, leveraging principles of information architecture, interaction design and usability to develop innovative products that meet customers' expressed and unspoken needs.

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Mike Baukes is the cofounder and CEO of ScriptRock, a Bay Area startup that makes QA software easier for DevOps teams. ScriptRock's flagship product, GuardRail, is a cloud-based change, configuration, and release monitoring solution that helps enterprises deliver ideas to market faster and safer.

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Trail Ridge Consulting
Concurrent Sessions Agile Leadership and Culture

Leadership and organizational agility coach Pete Behrens has been guiding enterprise agile transformations for more than thirteen years. Through his unique "inside-out" approach to agile transformation, Pete guides organizational leaders in assessing, integrating, and transforming their organizations through agile leadership maturity, cultural alignment, and organizational agility. His work has been instrumental in successful agile transformations at Salesforce.com, GE Healthcare, and McKinsey & Company IT.

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Jennifer Bonine is a VP of global delivery and solutions for tap|QA, Inc., a global company that specializes in strategic solutions for businesses. Jennifer began her career in consulting, implementing large ERP solutions. She has held executive level positions leading development, quality assurance and testing, organizational development, and process improvement teams for Fortune 500 companies in several domains. In a recent engagement for one of the world’s largest technology companies, Jennifer served as a strategy executive and in corporate marketing for the C-Suite.

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Software Quality Engineering

A consultant, lecturer, author, and test manager, Rick Craig has led numerous teams of testers on both large and small projects. In his thirty years of consulting worldwide, Rick has advised and supported a diverse group of organizations on many testing and test management issues. From large insurance providers and telecommunications companies to smaller software services companies, he has mentored senior software managers and helped test teams improve their effectiveness.

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binaris informatik GmbH

An enthusiastic trainer, Carsten Czeczine teaches agile methods, including Scrum and kanban, and the advanced development practices of test-driven development, design patterns, and Clean Code. Carsten combines up-to-date learning strategies, state of the art knowledge, and having fun. His unique coaching style is key to supporting several companies, introducing agile, and increasing the productivity of the software development departments. Carsten is the producer of the well-known German podcast Scrumidable.

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Certified SCAMPI lead appraiser and CMMI instructor Jeff Dalton is an author, a consultant with more than twenty-five years of software process improvement experience, and president of Broadsword, a management consulting firm serving North American clients in the aerospace, commercial software, automotive, embedded engineering, manufacturing, and DoD market sectors. Jeff blogs at Ask the CMMI Appraiser where he answers questions on topics related to agile methods, CMMI, and SCAMPI.

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An agile methodologist, practitioner, and coach based in Cary, NC, Bob Galen helps guide companies in their adoption of Scrum and other agile methodologies and practices. Bob is a principal agile evangelist at Velocity Partners, a leading agile nearshore development partner; president of RGCG; and frequent speaker on software development, project management, software testing, and team leadership at conferences and professional groups. He is a Certified Scrum Coach, Certified Scrum Product Owner, and an active member of the Agile and Scrum Alliances.

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Ellen Gottesdiener, founder and principal with EBG Consulting, is an internationally recognized leader in the collaborative convergence of requirements + product management + project management. Ellen coaches and trains individuals and teams, and facilitates discovery and planning workshops across diverse industries. She writes widely and speaks at conferences worldwide.

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Agile testing coach and practitioner Janet Gregory (@janetgregoryca) is the coauthor of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams and a contributor to 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. Janet specializes in showing agile teams how testers can add value in areas beyond critiquing the product. For the past ten years, she has been working with teams to transition to agile development.

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A systems engineer and project management consultant, Payson Hall is a founding member of Catalysis Group, Inc. Formally trained as a software engineer and computer scientist, Payson has performed and consulted on a variety of hardware and software systems integration projects in both the public and private sectors throughout North America and Europe during his thirty-year professional career. He has been a writer and featured speaker on topics of systems integration, project management, and risk management.

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Certified Scrum Coach David Hawks founded Agile Velocity when he noticed companies ineffectively building innovative software products with a lot of waste. David has a background of building highly productive teams and a passion for helping others achieve similar success. His strengths lie in his ability to be a great facilitator and an inefficiency killer. David’s facilitation skills allow him to be a strong organizational coach and to lead a great learning experience.

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Arthur Hicken has been involved in automating various practices at Parasoft for more than twenty years. He has worked on projects including database development, the software development lifecycle, web publishing and monitoring, and integration with legacy systems. Arthur has worked with IT departments in companies including Cisco, Vanguard, and Motorola to help improve their software development practices. He has developed and conducted numerous technical training courses at Parasoft.

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Regis University

John Holmes is the lead trainer and agile/Scrum coach for a large commercial defense aerospace company that has successfully adopted the principles and practices of agile and Scrum globally. As a certified ScrumMaster, Product Owner, and Scaled Agile Framework Consultant, John has taught more than 4,000 colleagues a tailored lean-agile curriculum and has worked as a lean-agile consultant, coach, and advisor.

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Working with companies of all sizes worldwide, David Hussman teaches and coaches the adoption of agile methods as powerful delivery tools. Sometimes he pairs with developers and testers; other times he helps plan and create product roadmaps. David often works with leadership groups to pragmatically use agile methods to foster innovation and a competitive business advantage. Prior to working as a full-time coach, he spent years building software in the audio, biometrics, medical, financial, retail, and education sectors.

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A recognized thought leader on product management and marketing, Steve Johnson has been teaching, writing, and speaking on product management topics since 1995. Steve’s approach is based on the belief that minimal process and simple templates result in a nimble product marketing and management team. He has authored many articles on technology product marketing and management. Steve is cofounder of Applied Frameworks, focused on the strategic role of product management in agile environments.

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Scrum, Inc

A consultant at Scrum, Inc., and inventor of the eXtreme Manufacturing project management method, Joe Justice is the founder of Team WIKISPEED, an all Scrum volunteer-based, “green” automotive prototyping company. Joe is a principal thought leader in Scrum, a TEDx speaker, and coach for agile hardware and manufacturing teams worldwide. He consults and coaches teams on implementing Scrum at all organizational levels, both in software and physical manufacturing.

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Ardita Karaj is a passionate Toronto-based agile coach, trainer, change agent, and consultant. Ardita brings more than fifteen years of software development experience in commercial and public organizations. Recently she has focused on process improvement for organizations adopting agile frameworks including Scrum and Kanban. Ardita is well known for applying agile and lean techniques to help identify and remove barriers in order to streamline software development efforts.

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Mitch Lacey & Associates, Inc.

In the past fifteen years, Mitch Lacey has managed numerous plan-driven and agile projects. At Microsoft, Mitch honed his agile skills, successfully releasing core enterprise services for Windows Live, and transitioned from program manager to Agile Coach, helping others transition to agile practices. At Ascentium Corporation he became the agile practice manager, coaching customers on agile practices and adoption worldwide.

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After working in various management and technical positions in software development and product management, Philip Lew leads XBOSoft’s (xbosoft.com) direction and strategy as CEO. His Ph.D. research in software quality and usability resulted in several IEEE and ACM journal publications and in various trade journals as well.

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A software consultant at the Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc. in New York City, Tim Lister divides his time consulting, teaching, and writing. Tim is a coauthor with his Guild partners of Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior; coauthor with Tom DeMarco of Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects—both Jolt Award winners as General Computing Book of the Year. Tim and Tom coauthored the classic Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 3rd Edition.

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With twenty-five years of industry experience Michael Mah teaches, writes, and consults for QSM Associates to tech companies on measuring and estimating software projects for offshore, waterfall, and agile. Michael and his QSM partners have researched thousands of projects worldwide. His work examines time-pressure dynamics of teams and their contribution to project success and failure. Michael’s clients include Boeing, Progressive, Verizon Wireless, Nationwide, JPMorgan Chase, and other Fortune 100 companies.

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Nationwide Insurance

A director in applications development with Nationwide Insurance, Jay McFarling partners with internal IT organizations to deliver new software development for their applications and provides transformational coaching for agile and lean adoption. Jay has been creating and managing software development projects since the days of Pascal and COBOL. His career spans all IT professions and includes many critical transformational projects from Y2K to platform consolidations and application redesigns.

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New York University

Mark Meretzky has been teaching since 1990 at the New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies, where he has created courses in UNIX, C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, iOS, and Android. Many years before that, Mark taught Zilog Z80 assembly language on the original Radio Shack TRS-80. He was one of the operators of the Andrus Planetarium at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York, and in his spare time still programs astronomical simulations with the application Celestia, using a custom superset of the language Lua.

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Chief technology officer and a cofounder of LeanDog, Jeff “Cheezy” Morgan has been teaching classes and coaching teams on agile and lean techniques since early 2004. Most of his work has focused on the engineering practices used by developers and testers. For the past few years Cheezy has experienced great success and recognition for his work focused on helping teams adopt Acceptance Test Driven Development using Cucumber. He has authored several popular Ruby gems used by software testers and the book Cucumber & Cheese—A Testers Workshop.

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Rob Myers is the founder of Agile Institute. He has twenty-eight years of professional experience on software development teams, and has been training and coaching organizations in Agile, Scrum, and Extreme Programming topics since 1998. He has recently worked with numerous organizations, from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies, helping them with cultural change and essential practices during their Agile transformations.

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David Nielson and Associates

David Nielson brings more than three decades of corporate, Fortune 500, and private consulting experience in organizational change management, leadership development, and training. David has helped guide large-scale change initiatives and business strategy driven by ERP, mergers, restructuring, and the need for cultural change. He has been a frequent speaker at PMI, Project World, Chief Executive Network, and Management Resources Association.

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An agile player-coach and founder of CodeSquads, Nate Oster helps clients adopt lean and agile methods. Nate builds high-performance teams that adapt to change, embrace a pragmatic philosophy of continuous improvement, measure progress with new features, and deliver high-quality software that delights customers. As a coach, he inspires adopters with hands-on mentoring and simulations like The Kanban Racing Challenge, which provide a safe learning environment for new ideas. He promotes testing as a serious technical discipline.

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Jeff Payne is CEO and founder of Coveros, Inc., a software company that builds secure software applications using agile methods. Since its inception in 2008, Coveros has become a market leader in secure agile principles and was recognized by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest growing private US companies. Prior to founding Coveros, Jeff was chairman of the board, CEO, and cofounder of Cigital, Inc., a market leader in software security consulting.

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Software Quality Engineering

Dale Perry has more than thirty-eight years of experience in information technology as a programmer/analyst, database administrator, project manager, development manager, tester, and test manager. Dale’s project experience includes large-system development and conversions, distributed systems, and both client/server and web-based online applications. A professional instructor for more than twenty-four years, he has presented at numerous industry conferences on development and testing.

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An early believer in Java’s ability to deliver enterprise-grade software, Andrew Phillips quickly focused on the development of high-throughput, resilient, and scalable Java EE applications. After working on concurrency and high performance development for a succession of multinationals, Andrew joined agile specialists Xebia and is now VP Products for XebiaLabs, providers of the industry-leading release automation solution, Deployit. A cloud, service delivery, and automation expert, Andrew has been part of the shift to more automated application delivery platforms.

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International leadership expert, Pollyanna Pixton developed the models for collaboration and collaborative leadership through her thirty-eight years of working inside and consulting with many organizations. She helps companies create workplaces where talent and innovation are unleashed—making them more productive, efficient, and profitable. Pollyanna is a founding partner of Accelinnova, president of Evolutionary Systems, and director of the Institute for Collaborative Leadership.

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Atlassian
Industry Technical Presentations Git Branching for Agile Teams

Dan Radigan has fifteen years of experience in software development wearing a wide variety of hats―program management, engineering, quality, and now marketing. Dan is currently senior agile evangelist for Atlassian, makers of JIRA, a popular issue-tracking platform for product teams. He loves to see teams succeed with agile, and has helped many technical and nontechnical teams see its benefits and transition to agile. Previously Dan worked on software development teams for Netflix, Dell, and Adobe.

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Rice Consulting Services, Inc.

A leading author, speaker, and consultant with more than thirty years of experience in the field of software testing and software quality, Randy Rice has worked with organizations worldwide to improve the quality of their information systems and optimize their testing processes. He is coauthor (with William E. Perry) of Surviving the Top Ten Challenges of Software Testing and Testing Dirty Systems. Randy is an officer of the American Software Testing Qualifications Board (ASTQB).

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Agile Artisans
Concurrent Sessions SAFe: The Scaled Agile Framework

Principal consultant and a member of the core team at Agile Artisans, Jared Richardson works with other software craftsmen to build excellent custom software. He sold his first software program in 1991 and has been immersed in software ever since. Jared has authored and coauthored a number of books, including the best selling Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects and Career 2.0: Take Control of Your Life. He is a frequent speaker at software conferences and a thought leader in agile.

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Passionate about agile, Danielle Roecker manages a group of developers at Nationwide Insurance where they are successfully blending agile methodologies with cutting-edge development. Danielle uses her background as a software developer, project manager, and ScrumMaster to help teams fully embrace agile development. Her understanding of the human and business interactions has helped her lead Nationwide’s organizational change. She is a Certified ScrumMaster, PMI Agile Certified Practitioner, and Project Management Professional.

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Known as the “Pragmatic Manager,”Johanna Rothman helps organizational leaders identify problems and risks in their product development and recognize potential “gotchas,” seize opportunities, and remove impediments. Johanna is the technical editor for agileconnection.com and is author of Manage Your Job Search, Hiring Geeks That Fit, Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, the 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It!

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AmiBug.com

Rob Sabourin, P. Eng., has more than thirty years of management experience leading teams of software development professionals. A well-respected member of the software engineering community, Rob has managed, trained, mentored, and coached hundreds of top professionals in the field. He frequently speaks at conferences and writes on software engineering, SQA, testing, management, and internationalization.

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With more than forty years of experience, the founder and CEO of Net Objectives Al Shalloway is an industry thought leader in lean, SAFe, kanban, product portfolio management, Scrum, and agile design. Al helps companies transition enterprise-wide to lean and agile methods, and teaches courses in these areas—one of a handful of SAFe SPC trainers.

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Agile Learning Labs
Concurrent Sessions Estimating Business Value

A Certified Scrum Trainer, agile coach, and recovering C++ developer, Chris Sims helps software development teams improve their productivity and happiness. Chris is the founder of Agile Learning Labs and the Bay Area Agile Managers Support Group.

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Excella Consulting
Concurrent Sessions The Agile Dashboard

Fadi Stephan is an agile coach, trainer, and consultant with Washington, DC-based Excella Consulting. Fadi has more than fifteen years of professional experience as a product manager, project manager, software developer, ScrumMaster, and consultant at both Federal agencies and businesses ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. Since 2006, his focus has been on agile adoption and on transitioning, coaching, and mentoring teams in agile and Scrum practices.

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A quality engineering architect at Salesforce.com, Keith Stobie plans, designs, and reviews software architecture and tests. Keith’s interests are in testing methodology, tools technology, and quality process. He has more than twenty years in the software testing and quality engineering field with a focus on distributed systems testing. Keith has worked at TiVo, Doyenz, BEA, Informix, and Tandem, and on Microsoft projects including Windows Communication Foundation, Bing, and the Protocol Engineering team working on model-based testing.

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“Less talk, more rock” are words Joel Tosi likes to live by. Instead of telling teams what to do, he prefers to pair with organizations and teams to create meaningful products. Whether working with product owners on product learning, testing teams trying to balance automation, or developers and operations teams interested in continuous delivery, Joel enjoys rolling up his sleeves to work with the teams. Sharing his experiences as a coach, architect, developer, and manager, he is a hands-on collaborator and community builder.

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A leading international consultant, trainer, and recognized expert in software testing, Erik van Veenendaal (erikvanveenendaal.nl) is the founder of Improve Quality Services BV, a company that specializes in testing, requirements engineering, and quality management.

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The author of implementingscrum.com, Michael Vizdos travels internationally working with clients to improve product delivery to their customers using Scrum and other agile techniques. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer with more than twenty years of experience in all facets of software development and product delivery.

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binaris informatik GmbH

A passionate software engineer for more than twenty years, Thorsten Werle became interested in agile methods in 2007, when he worked on his first agile project. Since then Thorsten has been a Product Owner, Certified ScrumMaster, software engineer, and agile coach with Scrum, eXtreme Programming, and kanban. Since 2000, he has been responsible for the internal training of new employees of binaris informatik GmbH. Thorsten is a founder of binaris-education.com.

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Leading Software Maniacs

Ken Whitaker of Leading Software Maniacs® has more than twenty-five years of software development executive leadership and training experience in a various roles and industries. He has led commercial software teams at Software Publishing (remember Harvard Graphics?), Data General, embedded systems software companies, and enterprise software suppliers. Ken is an active PMI® registered education provider, Project Management Professional (PMP)® certified, and a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM).

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James Whittaker is a technology executive with a career that spans academia, start-ups, and top tech companies. With a PhD in computer science, James worked for IBM, Ericsson, SAP, Cisco, and Microsoft. In 1996, he joined the faculty at Florida Institute of Technology where his work in Y2K testing and software security earned many awards. James’ first stint at Microsoft was in Trustworthy Computing and then Visual Studio. In 2009, he joined Google as an engineering director and led teams working on Chrome, Chrome OS, Maps, and Google+.

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Diane Zajac-Woodie (@agilesquirrel) has spent the last six years redefining the business analyst role as more than a requirements dictator. Through open and honest conversations, Diane guides her business partners toward creative solutions that solve problems and eliminate waste. She shares this same approach with her technical teams, facilitating communication, cooperation, and continuous learning to ensure success.

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Siemens AG

A principal engineer at Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, in Munich, Germany, Peter Zimmerer has been working in the field of software testing and quality engineering for more than twenty years. Peter performs consulting, coaching, and training on test management and test engineering practices in real-world projects, driving research and innovation in this area. An ISTQB® Certified Tester Full Advanced Level, Peter is a member of the German Testing Board, has authored several journal and conference contributions, and is a frequent speaker at international conferences.

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