Lori Weiss
Director of Operations and External Relations
Lori Weiss is a native of Los Angeles, California and graduated from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1979 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science. Ms. Weiss later attended Pepperdine University where she graduated in 1992 with a degree of Master of Business Administration.
Ms. Weiss has been involved in the high-technology industry since 1985 when she joined Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group (ATG). For more than 11 years, Ms. Weiss managed ATG’s Learning Concepts Group, which included several education research programs, most notably the multi-year Vivarium Program. The Vivarium Program collaborated with an elementary school in Los Angeles’s Magnet Program. Among many accomplishments, the Learning Concepts Group created an object-oriented programming language, which has evolved in to an open source object oriented programming language called Squeak.
In addition to managing the Learning Concepts Group, in 1993, Ms. Weiss was also the Business Manager for Apple’s East/West Consortium, part of ATG’s Authoring Tools group. Ms. Weiss managed the business aspects of DARPA's Technology Reinvestment Program (TRP). The TRP aimed at lowering post-Cold War defense spending by stimulating industry to create products for both the private sector and the defense community. The East/West Group combined the efforts of organizations from the east of the U.S. (Houghton Mifflin Company, PWS Publishers (an International Thomson company), University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Carnegie Mellon University) with the west (University of Colorado at Boulder, Stanford University, and Apple Computer).
In 1996 Ms. Weiss joined Walt Disney Imagineering's Research and Development group as Director of Business Management. At Disney she interfaced between R&D and other organizations within the Walt Disney Company to transition projects out of R&D and into Disney Stores, Theme Parks and Disney's animation division. Ms. Weiss went on to work in executive education as Vice President for Program Development for Technology Transfer Institute’s (TTI) Vanguard Program. After TTI, Ms. Weiss worked with two consulting firms where she did marketing and program development. In 2003, Ms. Weiss went back to her roots when she joined USC Institute for Creative Technologies. At ICT, Ms. Weiss is part of the senior management team, where she works in operations and external relations. In this role, Ms. Weiss works closely with ICT's Executive Director and other directors, as well as interfacing between ICT's researchers, Project Leaders, and the Institute’s business office. She is also the POC for external relations.