Mary Lou Jepsen, PhD

Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen is Founder and Chair of the Board of Openwater, a San Francisco-based medical laser imaging device technology company. She also serves as a Director on both the Board of Lear Corporation, a Fortune 150 automotive components supplier, and Luminar Technologies a pioneer in LiDAR and autonomous driving. As a prolific inventor and entrepreneur, Dr. Jepsen has been named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine (“Time 100”), in addition to CNN’s top 10 thinkers in science and technology. She has over 200 patents published or issued to her name. Previously, Dr. Jepsen served as the Executive Director of Engineering at Facebook, Inc. and Head of Display Technologies at Oculus, and she has also held similar roles at Google, Inc. and X (formerly Google[x]). Prior to this, Dr. Jepsen was a professor at MIT and co-founded the nonprofit organization “One Laptop per Child,” for which she served as CTO and lead architect on design, cost-down, and scale components for the $100 laptops that were successfully shipped to millions of children in the developing world. Dr. Jepsen received her PhD in Optical Physics as well as her ScB in Electrical Engineering and Studio Art from Brown University.