Defect Tracking
Meet Mary Lefaiver, PhD, MEA’s Strategic Programs & Innovation Associate, who has never been especially interested in staying inside one professional lane. Her intentionally cross-disciplinary role draws on learning strategy, research, human-centered design, and emerging technology to support organizational learning, governance, AI-enabled opportunities, and other special initiatives.
Mary earned her doctorate in e-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning from Lancaster University (UK), where she explored how leadership develops in everyday work in technology-mediated teams, focusing on how voice, participation, shared agency, and attention to power structures create the conditions for people to lead, influence, and flourish.
Working in the family business with her brother, Curtis, is a welcome and unexpected turn. Learning a whole new industry while contributing a different skillset to MEA raises her pulse in a good way. Her insatiable appetite for applying new knowledge makes unfamiliar territory especially appealing. For someone whose career has never fit neatly into one box, the arrangement suits her just fine.
Outside MEA, Mary founded Birdsong Business English, serves on the Ron Brown Scholar Program Advisory Board and as Minutes Secretary for the Angola Memorial Scholarship Fund, and is a Fulbright Specialist. She is based somewhere between Pittsburgh, Tampa, and whatever corner of the ether she's travelling through. She’s visited 29 of 30 Major League Baseball parks (ask about the holdout), plus ballparks in Japan and South Korea, completed the tennis Grand Slam, and follows two (completely objectively) excellent hockey teams: the Tampa Bay Lightning and Carolina Hurricanes. Norway set a high bar, but her favorite place is usually her next destination. Mary is most delighted when exploring somewhere new or discovering something she knew nothing about, which may explain how she found herself working at an engineering company in the first place!