Charis graduated from Bates College in 2002 magna cum laude with a BA in English. She began her career as an editor teaching people how to use SAP software and has translated technology for business stakeholders ever since.

She earned a high-tech MBA from Northeastern University in 2013, summa cum laude. In 2019, she joined Amazon, leading AI/ML strategy for the Cloud Intelligence team. Charis now works full-time as the global program manager for the EPIC Emotional Intelligence program.

Her work on reducing burnout was recently quoted in Inc. magazine. At Amazon, she serves as an Emotional Intelligence evangelist, IDE ambassador, Class Chat coach, and Hour of Code organizer.

Before joining Amazon, she worked independently in AI product strategy. Charis taught data science for MIT, Columbia, and Dartmouth, as well as product management, agile, metrics, and communication for General Assembly. Before that, she founded Rue La La’s data science team. While working at Microsoft, she launched a global crowdsourcing platform for data scientists and previously led technical projects at EMC and SAP.

She lives in Wells, Maine, with her 13-year-old daughter and two cats, where she enjoys remote work and frequent travel.