Alara Rogers was born in New York State, and attended the University of Pennsylvania with plans to get a doctorate in psychobiology. Her plans changed after attending Emory University for graduate studies, where she found editing role-playing games and working with computers to be more interesting than injecting laboratory mice with hormones or training monkeys to pull levers.
Alara entered the world of IT via database marketing and analytics on consumer demographic databases stored on mainframes, but soon discovered the joy of MS SQL Server and other relational databases, and has focused on business intelligence and SQL development ever since. Much of her experience over the past 10 years has been within the health care and health insurance industries, including HIPAA and other complex healthcare standards such as e-Measures, although she also maintained the databases and developed upgrades for a web site to allow city residents to purchase parking permits.
After joining Liquid Mercury full time in 2010, she's spent over five years of working almost exclusively with SharePoint. She has taught classes on Business Intelligence, and she speaks often at SharePoint Saturday and SQL Saturday events. She currently leads our Cloud Solutions practice, helping customers get the most out of Office 365, SharePoint Online, and Power BI.
Alara lives in Baltimore with her husband, four children, and more workstation computers than the number of people in her home. She writes science fiction in her spare time, and has also been known to translate Japanese animation and respond at length when someone is wrong on the Internet. Alara also writes fan fiction for fandoms such as Star Trek and My Little Pony. She's even brave enough to post it under her real name.
If you'd like to connect with Alara online, you can find her Twitter profile @alarajrogers.
