Marie Graham is the director of a high school VR/AR Lab, a teacher of humanities and innovation, and an immersive technology evangelist who leads and learns with an amazing group of students and faculty at The Mount Vernon School in Atlanta, Georgia. Partnering with Alienware, HTC Vive, and Oculus, her school, which is steeped in Design Thinking, has created a VR/AR lab where students develop immersive content that seeks to positively impact both local and international communities.

Recently, she and her students developed a virtual reality experience for pediatric rehab patients at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta; are partnering with Atlanta’s Holocaust museum to create interactive historical content for patrons, and are designing and conducting research about how VR might increase the quality of life for hospice patients.

Marie has had the honor of speaking coast-to-coast about VR and AR’s intersection with education, design, and medicine, including at Games for Change at the New School, Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, and Women Driving Innovation. She also looks forward to presenting at SX/SW in Austin and VR for Medicine at Cedars-Sinai in L.A. this spring.

In her former life, Marie was a family nurse practitioner and certified nurse-midwife, delivering over 1,000 babies at Northside Hospital after graduating from Emory University’s graduate nursing program. When she has a moment, she paints with mixed media, writes short fiction and poetry, and spends time with her amazing (and equally busy) family.