Kate Edwards is the CEO and principal consultant of Geogrify, a Seattle-based consultancy for content culturalization and is the former Executive Director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). In addition to being an outspoken advocate and industry leader that serves in several advisory/board roles, she is an applied geographer, writer, and corporate strategist. Formerly as Microsoft’s first Geopolitical Strategist in the Geopolitical Strategy team she created and managed, Kate was responsible for protecting the company against political and cultural content risks across all products and locales. Since leaving Microsoft, she has provided guidance to many companies on a wide range of geopolitical and cultural issues and she continues to work on a variety of game franchises. Kate is also the founder and former chair of the IGDA’s Localization Special Interest Group, a former board member of IGDA Seattle, the co-organizer of the Game Localization Summit at GDC, and is a regular columnist for MultiLingual Computing magazine. In October 2013, Fortune magazine named her as one of the "10 most powerful women" in the game industry and in December 2014 she was named by GamesIndustry.biz as one of their six People of the Year in the game industry.