Lauren Hayward Schaefer is a 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.