Stokes is a VP of User Research at BlackRock with over 15 years experience, including two Silicon Valley Innovation Labs. He’s worked as a consultant & shipping products for Sapient, Philips Electronics, Motorola/Google, Samsung Mobile, and JP Morgan Chase. He was trained as a Social Anthropologist at the London School of Economics, then conducted two years of fieldwork in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (before the iPhone factories arrived). He has also taught graduate students at two different centers of UX & Design Thinking: the IIT Institute of Design (in Chicago) and SCAD (in Savannah & Atlanta).