Dr. Rebecca Parsons is ThoughtWorks’ Chief Technology Officer. She has more years of application development experience than she cares to admit, in industries ranging from telecommunications to emergent internet services. She has extensive experience leading in the creation of large-scale distributed object applications and the integration of disparate systems. Before coming to ThoughtWorks she worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida where she taught courses in compilers, program optimization, distributed computation, programming languages, theory of computation, machine learning and computational biology. She also worked as Director’s Post Doctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory researching issues in parallel and distributed computation, genetic algorithms, computational biology and non-linear dynamical systems. Rebecca received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Economics from Bradley University, a Masters of Science in Computer Science from Rice University and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.