Dr. Karen Sobel Lojeski, CEO & Founder Virtual Distance International   There's a definitive reason why Dr. Karen Sobel Lojeski has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Washington Post and has spoken at major venues including the United Nations, World Bank and the World Economic Forum. Through her more than quarter century of leadership at companies ranging from Chase Manhattan Bank to Stratus Computer to Mercer Consulting, she began to observe and investigate what she'd later call Virtual Distance, a mathematically quantifiable and scientifically researched measure of what is lost when the human being is translated through the machine. While technology brought higher productivity in one form, she also watched as misunderstandings and team dysfunction grew as virtual communications became ever present among the worldwide workforce. Disturbed by these trends, Karen decided to research what might be causing them and then find ways to course correct as technology-enabled communications continued to explode. This led to her discovery of Virtual Distance while at Stevens Institute of Technology where she earned her Ph.D., and her thesis, “Virtual Distance: A New Model for the Study of Virtual Work”, won Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award in 2006. Having previously earned her B.S. in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Dr. Lojeski was able to combine her deep engineering experience with her executive success to unearth a significant social issue that sits at the intersection of technology and complex people-based systems. Since then, she's written two books on the topic, Leading the Virtual Workforce and Uniting the Virtual Workforce, held a professorship in the Department of Technology and Society at Stony Brook University, and transformed her company, Virtual Distance International, from a consulting business to a SaaS company specializing in providing solutions to the challenges around Workplace Transformation. Her clients include Coca-Cola, Bank of America, Alcatel-Lucent, Microsoft, among many others. In addition to her corporate work, she maintains academic appointments and affiliations with a number of universities around the world, including: Stockholm School of Economics, Wharton School of Business, Institute for Advanced Study and Tandon School of Engineering at NYU.