Elizabeth A. Vazquez is the Executive Director of Quantum Leaps, Inc., a non-profit organization created to promote women in business globally, and the President and Co-Founder of TradeBuilders, Inc., a company that helps clients use information and communication technologies to facilitate international trade and professional networking, improve organizational development, build global alliances, and share best practices in areas such as eCommerce and eGovernment.

As the Executive Director of Quantum Leaps, Inc., Ms. Vazquez works with a powerful global network of leaders who are working to advance women in business through international conferences, best practices exchanges, videoconferencing, study tours, expert roundtables, and eLearning forums. Quantum Leaps works on critical issues for businesses at all stages of development including research, data and statistics; entrepreneurial education and training; access to microcredit, debt and equity finance; access to networks and to corporate, government and international markets; technology as an entrepreneurial enabler; and advocacy and constituency building.

Examples of recent Quantum Leaps initiatives include expert roundtables on topics such as Access to Corporate, Government and International Markets, hosted by the US Department of Commerce; Entrepreneurial Education and Training to Spur Growth along the Business Continuum, hosted by Georgia Tech’s Graduate College of Management in Atlanta; and High Growth Women’s Entrepreneurship, hosted by Stanford University. Ms. Vazquez also helped to organized several international events including an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) forum in Turkey on women’s entrepreneurship, and a follow-up forum in Turkey on awareness building for women’s entrepreneurship in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. In addition, she organized recent expert roundtables sponsored by IBM on women and technology in South Korea and the UK with national women business leaders, hosted study tours for UK executives interested in women’s entrepreneurship in the US, spoke at international conferences in Chile and Taiwan, and contributed to an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation and Development (APEC) research initiative on women and eBusiness. Ms. Vazquez is also the Vice President of the Women in Business Committee for the International Council for Small Business.

As President of TradeBuilders, Ms. Vazquez has worked with government leaders and senior corporate executives on hosting Internet-based "virtual trade missions" and other events in countries such as Brazil, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, India, Israel, Germany, Malaysia, Singapore, the UK and the US. She has served as a speaker at numerous international conferences, and has published articles on trade, technology, business associations and women entrepreneurs. She has been interviewed by the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Kiplinger Business Forecast, Washington Business Journal, Toronto Globe and Mail, India Abroad, NPR’s "All Things Considered", Talk America Radio Network, Darshan TV, and others.

Ms. Vazquez has traveled extensively as a speaker on various business issues, and has lived and worked in North and South America. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in political science and received her Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, where she studied development economics and international negotiation and conflict resolution as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. She also completed graduate seminars at Harvard Law School, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Heinz School at Carnegie Mellon University, and Sookmyung Women’s University in Korea.