Our People

Sara wrangles engineering projects for LII, where she has been working from time immemorial. Although rumors persist of a dot-com stint and a research post at Harvard Business School, she remains skeptical. When she’s not looking after the welfare of a few hundred thousand web pages, she focuses on features which elucidate the connections between the law and things in the real world.

Craig is a 2007 graduate of Cornell Law School, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the LII Supreme Court Bulletin. He then spent six years at a large law firm in California litigating a broad range of commercial and technical disputes before returning to LII, first as an Associate Director and now as Co-Director. In his current role, Craig keeps one eye on our original content and the other on LII’s non-technical operations, such as budgeting, fundraising, etc.

Valarie serves as the Business Manager, overseeing daily administrative demands and ensuring LII’s smooth operations. She manages budgeting, tracks expenses, and coordinates staff schedules, while also overseeing student employment programs. Valarie is often the main point of contact for internal and external inquiries, handling communications with clients, partners, and university departments. She also organizes visits, meetings, and events, managing logistics and ensuring everything runs efficiently. With extensive experience in office management, Valarie plays a key role in maintaining organizational structure and supporting overall operations.

Neli Karabelova manages communications and engagement for the LII in order to further the Institute’s mission of helping the public find and understand law. Neli handles mass communications, identifying and building personal relationships with supporters and affinity groups, and strengthening the visual identity and overall brand of the LII. Her previous experience includes heading Marketing and Communications for an international law firm, and freelance photography.

Nichole recruits and oversees the student research assistants who review and create original content for the LII. She also coordinates and manages the production of new content and the development of new collections.
Trained as a librarian, Nichole has worked in public, academic, and specialized libraries; she has previously supported the Law Library of Congress as a Metadata Intern and worked as a law firm librarian. Nichole volunteers as a digital archivist for KRIA: The Icelandic Constitution Archives and is a former adjunct faculty member at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies. In addition to her M.S. in Library and Information Science, Nichole has a B.A. in Women’s Studies, and an M.S. in Criminal Justice Administration.

Sylvia uses data mining and natural language processing to transform dry legal texts into attractive, easy-to read, but accurate reflections of themselves. She also mentors Master of Engineering students on projects in these areas. (The LII works with ten+ M.Eng. students every year on various computer-and-law projects.)
With a BS in Engineering from Swarthmore, Sylvia began working with computers on her first job out of college as a research engineer with the Computational Biology Group at the DuPont Experimental Station in Delaware. “That’s where all the computer science courses I had taken for fun at Swarthmore College came to the rescue,” she says.

Eric Gullufsen is an Ithaca-based programmer. A self-taught technologist, Eric began his coding adventures at college in Northern California, where he earned a B.A. in Mathematics. Eric is adept in many coding environments and has contributed to several large open-source projects (LLVM, FreeBSD). Prior to working for LII, Eric was a senior software developer at the Alaska Department of Education & Early Development. Thus far at LII, his work has focused on Continuous Integration/Testing systems and server-side/backend code.

Matt is an Austin-based lawyer and software developer whose work at LII has a special focus on updating LII’s state regulations collections. He has worked for most of his career in legal publishing, including writing headnotes for California caselaw and developing open source software for legal authority automation. He blogs about legal tech at pythonforlaw.com.

Vivek has been very interested in technology from a young age, especially with using it to help people in their daily lives. He has started on this goal after going to Ithaca College to study computer science. During his time at college, Vivek has worked on fun and exciting projects with others, including a mobile app based off the Ithaca’s music festival, Porchfest. Additionally, he has worked as a summer research intern and a teaching assistant. Having graduated with a B.S degree in Computer Science, Vivek is now a developer for the LII team.