Autumn Harting

​Autumn Harting has spent her career writing, though up until now, all of her published work has been on technical subjects. Her first degree is in Biomedical Engineering, which led to a role as a researcher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. There Autumn co-authored a metadata specification, explored the use of ontologies for advancing biological research, and developed CellML, an XML language for describing biological models.

Upon returning to the United States, she joined Design Science, where her roles included MathML evangelism and working with standards bodies to provide guidance for inclusion of MathML in such standards as DITA and PDF/UA.

With a general interest in XML, it was not much of a leap for her move to Quark Software, a prominent vendor of XML editing software. A thought leader at Quark, she wrote for Quark’s blog and published papers in trade publications both about Quark software and more broadly about XML.

Recently, Autumn turned her focus to a passion project, applying an engineer’s problem-solving mindset to the question of: What is happiness? Her research has evolved into a non-fiction book that aims to break down happiness into a formula of sorts to help troubleshoot problems when we find ourselves unhappy.

Part of that equation, she can share, are the people who support and sustain us. Autumn’s closest support team are her husband, her daughter, and her two dogs.