Heart Survivor, Author, and Speaker

Mellanie is a heart survivor and the author of A Woman's Guide to Saving Her Own Life: The HEART Program for Health & Longevity. After having a brush with death in emergency heart surgery, Mellanie now uses her second chance to coach individuals in creating healthy lifestyles and organizations in creating healthy, productive workplaces.

Heart disease is the #1 killer, and stroke is #3. In the US each day, we lose nearly 3,000 men and women to heart disease and stroke. Forty per cent of us will get, and die from, heart disease or stroke. But it is preventable, if you know what to do.

Women have different heart symptoms than men, and they're typically very subtle, so for women, the first symptom is frequently a heart attack. Knowing those symptoms can save your life.

Mellanie's mission is to spread awareness of how to save your own life. She provides a message of hope and encouragement, sharing how to take control, decrease stress, and protect against heart disease. Audiences consistently say, You changed my life.

To further this mission, Mellanie is the founder and CEO of the American Foundation for Women's Health.

Mellanie also works with organizations that want healthy, productive workplaces to decrease stress and keep employees healthy, including how to leverage technology and culture in doing so.

Internet Pioneer and e-Business Strategist

Mellanie was also an Internet pioneer at J.C. Penney Company, Inc., over a decade ago, where she led the creation of one of the early corporate web sites, as well as an intranet and supplier extranet.

At Dell Inc., she was the executive in charge of creating and executing Dell’s intranet vision and strategy. At Cisco Systems, Inc., she was an e-Business Strategy Thought Leader in Cisco’s Global High-Tech Internet Business Solutions Practice, where she served as a Trusted Advisor to top executives of some of Cisco’s largest high tech customers.

As a renowned Internet visionary, she is the author of two intranet and groupware best-sellers, Intranet Business Strategies and Intranet as Groupware, published by John Wiley & Sons. She wrote for numerous business and technology publications, including a regular syndicated column for the Dallas Business Journal and other city business journals. 

She addressed audiences of hundreds and thousands at some of the earliest Internet events, in locations as diverse as Montreal, Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, and New Delhi, and has keynoted adjacent to such Internet luminaries as Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web. She was also a celebrity judge at the First India Internet Awards, in New Delhi, India.

Personal

In addition to being a wife and mother, Mellanie is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Heart Association for Williamson County and speaks and does media appearance on their behalf to raise awareness of heart disease and stroke.

She is also Treasurer of the Board of Directors of the Leadership Texas Alumni Association, a member of Women in Technology International (WITI), the National Speakers Association (NSA), the Heart of Texas chapter of the National Speakers Association, and the Austin chapter of Mended Hearts.

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