Dr. Lisa Rau is a co-founder of Fionta (renamed from Confluence in March, 2017). She has over thirty years of professional experience in the information technology industry, with the last 20 focused on supporting nonprofits with their technology.
Dr. Rau is a well-known leader in the nonprofit technology field. She specializes in the development of specific concepts, vision and direction for the strategic use of technology within nonprofits from a holistic, organizational perspective. Dr. Rau attended UC Berkeley in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, receiving a BS in EECS and MS in Computer Science before starting a research career at General Electric’s Corporate Research and Development Center. While leading a group of groundbreaking researchers in NLP and AI at GE CRD, she completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science. She was awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation Visiting Professorship award and taught Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Rau lectures widely as a thought leader and instructor, speaker and trainer on nonprofit technology topics. Recent and upcoming presentations can be found at https://fionta.com/conferences/. She has been an instructor with a number of nonprofit-focused programs: Tidewater Community College’s Academy for Nonprofit Excellence, the Center for Nonprofit Advancement’s Learning and Leadership Institute, and the Masters in Nonprofit Management program (Antioch University in LA). She has served as a peer reviewer for the Maryland Nonprofits’ Standards of Excellence. Prior to founding Fionta, from 1993-2001, Lisa was a senior executive at a commercial information technology services firm.