Jeff oversees institutional and programmatic communications, event planning, web presence, research project messaging, and assists with production management.

Before joining IFTF, Jeff worked at EPRI (Electric Power Research
Institute), with over ten years of research communications and project management experience for the Nuclear and Fossil Generation programs. He graduated from Saint Mary's College (Moraga, CA) with a B.A in business.

Cesar Castro is a Research Director at the Institute For The Future, working both with the Technology Horizons Team and the Health Horizons Team. His primary areas of research include open innovation, crowdsourcing, hybrid business models, and new models for online cooperative communities.

Matt serves as the research editor for the Ten-Year Forecast Program, supporting research efforts in a variety of ways. He thinks foresight and forecasting holds immense promise for addressing traditional social problems, and his passions mirror his IFTF research efforts on education, sustainability, social enterprise, and global development. In addition to his work on the Ten-Year Forecast, Matt has recently contributed to several other projects including the development of a map of future forces that will affect sustainability over the next ten years. He holds a B.A.

Matt serves as a research manager working on and leading special organization and research projects assigned by the Executive Director of IFTF. His background is in physics, planetary science, and foreign policy, and brings to the team a deep interest in emerging issues for science and technology policy, international affairs, and humanitarian issues. In addition to his work on research projects, Matt supports the Executive Director in all leadership and management demands for IFTF, including strategy, operations, board and client relations, and staff development.

Vivian brings to the Health Horizons Program extensive experience as a researcher, editor, and project manager. She has also worked in the health care field, primarily in pediatrics. Her interests in health care are focused on the provision of services to children, both regionally and globally, and in terms of well-child, acute care and palliative care. Vivian graduated from Boston University with a B.S. in broadcasting & film and a B.A. in history. She also has a J.D.

Born in Oakland, California in a time and place of great social change, Rod Falcon attended nearby UC Berkeley to better understand what was happening. There he studied history and social change as an undergraduate and public policy as a graduate student. After working one summer enforcing the Voting Rights Act for the Justice Department, he realized that public policy was not as future oriented as it might be and was inspired to do something about it. He came to IFTF to forecast the future of the California health care safety net and has stayed on for more than a decade and counting.

Lea Gamble grew up in a medical family, and after studying psychology in college, she turned to health policy to make her own contributions to the field.

As director of strategic partnerships, Lea works across IFTF to develop a wider audience for its programs, especially in health and health care. Her role spans client relations and development, account management, sales, marketing, and new business models.

As a Research Manager for the Technology Horizons program, Jess is interested in the future of media, particularly music, and how new technologies will shape the way we make, access, share, and appreciate media content. She covers the San Francisco music scene for TheOwlMag and her own blog, SFJukebox and has participated in panels sponsored by the Bandwidth Conference and the Bay Area Video Coalition.

Lyn is a cultural anthropologist who has spent the last 25 years living and working between California and mainland China. Her current research interests include the development of the Chinese language Internet, global families and changing daily life, the future of mobility, and youth and work. Lyn brings expertise in ethnographic methods and analysis to IFTF and has worked in all of its research programs. She has led numerous research tasks for individual clients and is a practiced content facilitator. Lyn is fluent in Mandarin.

Bob has worked for more than 30 years as a forecaster, exploring the human side of new technologies. He has a deep interest in the future of religion and its impact on business, society, and individuals. Bob works mainly with senior corporate executives across a wide range of industries. He has rich experience in presenting IFTF's foresight and then drawing out insights-inputs to strategy-and-action steps.

Crystal Lynn Keeler grew up in Nebraska, where she was inspired to make a difference by the innate kindness of the Nebraskan people. After studying biology and sociology in college, she was pointed in the direction of public health by a college teacher and found this field to be a perfect marriage of her studies and the desire to give back to the community. As a student of quantitative health policy, Crystal believes that small changes can have large impacts, a philosophy she applies to her interests in community nutrition and obesity.

Mike Liebhold is a Senior Researcher focusing on the mobile and abundant computation, immersive media and geospatial web foundations for context-aware and ubiquitous computing. Previously, Mike was a Visiting Researcher, Intel Labs, working on a pattern language based on semantic web frameworks for ubiquitous computing.

Mike researches and designs online collaborative spaces to improve interaction between IFTF researchers, its expert network, and its members. He is interested in the use of interactive visual tools to help find patterns in large sets of data. He has a degree in mathematics from Stanford University.

Miriam Lueck is a researcher in the Health Horizons program and across other projects at the Institute, contributing to a broad range of research tasks. She began interning with the Institute in 2003. As an ethnographer, her overarching interest lies in how people individually and collectively exert agency and embody the change described in forecasts, in their everyday lives. More specifically she explores how food connects people to each other, to their health and bodies, and to natural and built environments.

At IFTF, Rachel is a research manager for the Health Horizons Program. Rachel’s research interests include migration and health, the global trade of health services, the global portability of health and pension benefits, and the international movement of health professionals. At IFTF, Rachel conducts research on the ways new media and mobile technologies inform health care practices and deliver care, specializing on mobile technologies and access to digital content in Latin America.

Jane McGonigal is a game designer and a games researcher who specializes in networked experiences for real-world spaces. As a lead designer for 42 Entertainment, she uses ubiquitous computing technologies and metaphors to explore new social architectures and to create massively-scaled, collaborative play. As a researcher, she focuses on the ways in which collective gaming has long-term and persistent impacts on the cognitive frameworks, social relations, public participation, and personal identities of players in their everyday lives.

Lisa serves as the editorial assistant in IFTF's production department. She edits various deliverables and helps to organize the flow of projects that runs through IFTF at all times. In addition to her work as an editor, Lisa supports the Director of Communications in any way needed. Her interests lie in all things language-related: literature, editing, writing, etc. Lisa holds a BA in English literature, with a specialization in 18th Century British fiction, from Mills College in Oakland, CA.

A self-described nerd growing up, Sean read all he could about science as a kid, and immersed himself in maps for hours at a time. He also set his chemistry set on fire a few times, took junior high computer classes on a TRS-80, and was on his high school ecology team. In college, he switched from mechanical engineering to polymer science when he learned that polymer grads often went on to technical sales. The idea of technical sales piqued his interest, and an entrepreneur was born.

Neela works closely with the Research Managers on the Health Horizon team to make sure everything is in tact and ready to go into the next stage within the processes, and assists in areas of need with the research. She also provides administrative support for the Program Director, and day-to-day coordination and support for the Health Horizon team. Neela enjoys helping out the communities in need, which is why she has given her time in doing volunteer work at Planned Parenthood, Good Samaritan Hospital, and interned at Breathe California.

A native of New Delhi, India, Mani, brings an international perspective to IFTF. She has a lot of experience conducting surveys in the US and India. She has designed large-scale surveys looking at technology usage, health and food habits, work and career among US adults. She is conducting a comparative survey looking at technology usage and work and career aspirations among youth in India, China and USA. She has also conducted focus groups with high school and college students, and young workers in the US and India.

David Pescovitz is co-editor of the popular weblog BoingBoing.net and also editor-at-large for MAKE:, the DIY technology magazine. Pescovitz co-wrote the book Reality Check (HardWired, 1996), based on his long-running futurist column in Wired magazine where he remains a correspondent. He has also written for Scientific American, Popular Science, New York Times, Washington Post, Salon, and New Scientist, among many other publications.

Lynne Postlethwaite grew up in Salinas, California, a seminal agricultural area on the west coast. She learned early on of the fragility of the food supply and how important it is to safeguard the planet.

Jody Ranck's lifelong interest in science and society took him into health care, but two life-changing experiences informed his passion for studying the future of global health. The first was working at the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, where Jody learned how small loans to the poor work to raise people from poverty, develop local economies from the bottom up, and improve health. The second was the several years he spent in Rwanda during the genocide reconstruction. There Jody dedicated himself to studying the effects of mass violence and the way societies renegotiate social memory.

Andrea is a director in the Technology Horizons Program and has worked at IFTF for 16 years. Her work focuses on identifying the long-term demographic, social, and technological trends that shape the transformation of work, the workplace, and household life. In particular, Andrea examines the underlying factors and unarticulated needs and desires that shape the diffusion, adoption, and reinvention of information and communications technologies at home and at work.

Chris Sumner joined Institute for the Future in 1998.

Jason Tester's interests in interactive technology began the old-fashioned way, tinkering one-on-one with the equipment he had at hand. With his work on technological voting, however, he saw the possible effects of computer-human interaction on the future of society as a whole.

Anthony has been researching the implications of new technology on cities and public institutions for over a decade. His goal is to bring a scientific, rational approach to forecasting and to avoid the temptations of easy sound bites and unwarranted forecasts of doom.

At IFTF, Anthony's work focuses on several inter-related topics:

• mobility and urbanization
  
• science parks, incubators and regional innovation systems
  
• sustainability and telework
  
• pervasive computing
  
• future R&D models
  
• tourism and entertainment
  

Kathi Vian leads IFTF's Ten-Year Forecast Program, which is a broad scan of the emerging global environment, focusing on the intersection of new economic forces, changing environmental realities, and new social practices. She is the author of the annual Map of the Decade, which summarizes the most important trends and insights from each year's research across the Institute.