Marissa Mayer

Marissa Ann Mayer (born on 30 May 1975) is the Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at the search engine company Google. She acts as a gatekeeper for their product release process, determining when or whether a particular Google product is ready to be released to users. She has become one of the public faces of Google, providing a number of press interviews and appearing at events frequently to speak on behalf of the company.

She received her B.S. in Symbolic systems and M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Mayer was the first female engineer hired at Google and one of their first 20 employees, joining the company in early 1999.

Mayer has notable public involvement with Google Search and Gmail, and can be considered significantly responsible for the success of these UIs.

Some controversy exists regarding the perceived 'glass ceiling' and limited involvement of lower level web-designers and Google teams, beneath her.

Marissa leads the product management efforts on Google's search products. She joined Google in 1999 as Google's first female engineer. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. Prior to joining Google, Marissa worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich , Switzerland and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California .

Graduating with honors, Marissa received her B.S. in Symbolic Systems and her M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University . For both degrees, she specialized in artificial intelligence.