Steve Hannon

President and CEO

Steve has been President and CEO of LENA since 2013, leading LENA’s emergence as the industry standard for early talk measurement and programming. Before LENA, Steve served as a hybrid technical and business executive, leading development and commercialization of advanced sensors. Steve holds his PhD in electrical engineering from MIT.

Liz Petit

Senior Product Manager

Liz is a Senior Product Manager for LENA Grow. She brings 10 years of experience in the field of early childhood education including instructional and curriculum design, child development research, and program/product management. After studying poetry and literature at the University of Virginia, Liz developed a passion for understanding how children develop language. At LENA Liz works to improve young children’s development by designing and enhancing programs for teachers and families that are user-friendly and impactful. She has been with LENA since 2019.

Vince Swartout

Chief Operating Officer

Vince is Chief Information and Operations Officer at LENA. Prior to LENA, he played strategic and tactical roles building a nationwide data processing company, and helped the Dolan Company through its IPO. Along the way he developed proprietary process improvement and workflow modelling methods, became well versed in audit and information security, and saw first-hand how important it is to connect good people and good “IT.” Vince has been with LENA since 2013.

Sahar Bou-Ghazale

Vice President of Technology Innovation

Dr. Sahar Bou-Ghazale is Vice President of Technology Innovation at LENA. With over 25 years of expertise in voice recognition, audio standards, and speech processing, Sahar has led technology roadmap development across global teams and guided products from inception to high-volume production. Having published over 20 publications and patents, Sahar passionately applies her expertise to help children’s language development.