Mariya Lysenkova founded her first company at the age of seventeen. This firm specialized in web site localizations, which seemed natural given Ms. Lysenkova's fluency in four languages. She went on to graduate from New York University with a double degree in Computer Science and Linguistics.

While in university, Ms. Lysenkova pursued her interest in the confluence between natural language and pure data by working with Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek software, on a sprint to develop the FogBugz SPAM filter.

Since then, Ms. Lysenkova has devoted much of her research and development time to the areas of usability, application design, and database engineering.

When not solving problems for Carrara's clients, Ms. Lysenkova manages the development of Webi.st, a proprietary Ruby on Rails CMS platform geared to niche markets.

Ms. Lysenkova is a stickler for elegant, readable code, and for her teams' adherence to sound engineering principles.