In 2001, she was one of the founders of the XP Universe conference, which merged with the Agile Development Conference to become the Agile 20xx conference. She was program chair for XP Universe in 2001 and 2002. Laurie has conducted several empirical studies on Extreme Programming and other agile development practices in particular pair programming and test-driven development. Laurie is the lead author of Pair Programming Illuminated and a co-editor of Extreme Programming Perspectives. Laurie received her undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering from Lehigh University, an MBA from Duke University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah. Prior to returning to academia to obtain her PhD, she worked at IBM for nine years. Kent McDonald