Leslie Speer is a designer and educator with over 20 years experience working for companies and clients in the U.S., Europe, Central America and Mexico, such as Dupont, Philips, Oracle/Sun Microsystems, Frog Design, the Costa Rican Ministry of Culture, Banamex and various non-governmental organizations.
She is the founder and director of the Simple Limb Initiative, a collective that designs, develops and tests low cost upper and lower limb prosthesis. Speer has held academic positions at the California College of the Arts and San José State University and is a guest lecturer at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle in Paris and at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts in China. She received a bachelor's degree in industrial design from California State University at Long Beach, and a master's in product design, innovation and management (MDES) from Middlesex University, U.K.