Erin Summers, from Facebook’s Social VR team shares lessons on what helps people connect in VR. She previews what’s next and explores best practices for building inclusive and immersive social experiences.

Erin is a Senior Software Engineer at Facebook, where she builds immersive social experiences for Virtual Reality. Over the last 5+ years Erin has built Facebook Pages, threaded comments on Facebook, mobile advertising tools, growth infrastructure tools at Oculus, Facebook Spaces, led analytics for the social VR org, and is now building foundational social VR infrastructure. She is also CEO and Cofounder of the nonprofit wogrammer – a movement to highlight the successes of women in engineering. She’s interviewed over 200 women all over the world on every continent. Erin has a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Berkeley and degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from NC State. She is a 2015 Foreign Policy Global Thinker, and NSF Graduate Fellow, an Insight Data Science Fellow, an Amelia Earhart Scholar, and a NASA Jenkins Fellow.

If you’re in the Charlotte area, check out our schedule of upcoming talks to see one in person.