We will be livestreaming 20+ Elevate speakers this Friday, March 8, 2019 to our global Girl Geek X community! Don’t miss out – get your FREE all-access virtual conference pass at elevate.girlgeek.io
Here are 20 inspiring women elevating tech:
Akilah Bolden-Monifa is Senior Vice President at ARISE Global Media and editor-in-chief of Arise 2.0, a global digital publication by LGBTQ folks of color and allies. Akilah is a former lawyer and self-taught developer who built her first Alexa skill called “Black History Everyday” at age 60.
Anna Bethke is Head of AI for Social Good at Intel. She is actively involved in the AI ethics discussion, collaborating on research surrounding the design of fair, transparent, ethical, and accessible AI systems. In her previous role as a deep learning data scientist, Anna was a member of the Intel AI Lab, developing deep learning natural language processing algorithms as part of the NLP Architect open source repository.
Citlalli Solano Leonce is a Senior Engineering Manager at Palo Alto Networks. She and her teams develop the backend of the Public Cloud Security service that protects enterprises as they unleash the power of the cloud. Citlalli has navigated her teams through M&A integrations while successfully building highly distributed API-based SaaS security platforms. Earlier in her career, she has developed software for CirroSecure, Cisco, Apple and The Central Bank of Mexico.
Colleen Bashar is Vice President of Pre-Sales at Guidewire. She has been focused on enterprise software for 19 years with a track record in both revenue and organizational growth. Colleen leverages skills acquired through her engineering degree, MBA and both large and small organizations, to deliver a unique perspective on the challenges of growth and scale and selling in a competitive market.
Dena Metili Mwangi is a Software Engineer at Sentry. She works on the Growth team at Sentry, an open source error monitoring tool. She is a Hackbright grad with a MA in Economics from Duke University with a passion for leveraging data and analytics to build better products. She’s passionate about using tech for good and paying it forward. Prior to Sentry, she worked as a Research Analyst at the World Bank.
Farnaz Ronaghi is CTO & Co-Founder at NovoEd. Farnaz studied engineering in Tehran before continuing her studies at Stanford University, where she she designed and developed the first version of NovoEd during her PhD studies at Stanford University. NovoEd provides online learning for busy professionals, and was acquired recently by Devonshire Investors to accelerate expansion of the market-leading enterprise learning delivery platform.
Grishma Jena is a Cognitive Software Engineer at IBM. She works on data science for marketing at IBM Watson. Her research interests are in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. Grishma was recently a mentor for AI4ALL’s AI Project Fellowship, where she guided a group of high school students to use AI for prioritizing 911 EMS calls.
Heidi Williams is CTO & Co-Founder at tEQuitable, building a platform to address bias, discrimination, and harassment in the workplace. Prior to co-founding tEQuitable, Heidi was Vice President of Platform Engineering at Box for 4 years. Heidi is the founder of WEST, a mentoring program for women building careers in tech. Before Box, Heidi worked at Adobe for 17 years, beginning her career as a software engineer.
Janet George is a Fellow and Chief Data Scientist at Western Digital. She is a technical leader with over 15 years of experience in big data platform, machine learning, distributed computing, compilers, and artificial intelligence. Prior to Western Digital, she served as managing director, chief scientist, and big data expert at Accenture technology labs and served as head of Yahoo Labs Research Engineering.
Jen Taylor is Head of Products at Cloudflare. Prior to Cloudflare, she was a Senior Vice President of Product Management for Search at Salesforce. Prior to Salesforce, she held senior product management and marketing roles — including Manager of Platform Product Marketing at Facebook and Senior Director of Product Management at Adobe. Earlier in her career, Jen was a product manager at Macromedia (acquired by Adobe) for Dreamweaver.
Leyla Seka is Executive Vice President of the Salesforce Mobile platform experience, enabling all customers to unlock the power of Salesforce from anywhere. In this role, Leyla leads the charge on extending the power of Salesforce with a full portfolio of mobile apps, and she is responsible for driving product, go-to-market and other key programs around Salesforce’s mobile offerings. In her 11 years at Salesforce, Leyla has held a variety of positions across product management, product marketing and business operations.
Lili Gangas is Chief Technology Community Officer at Kapor Center. She helps catalyze Oakland’s emergence as a social impact hub of tech done right, tackling social and economic inequities of communities head-on. Lili advises inclusive tech entrepreneurship ecosystem building activities in Oakland, such as Oakland Startup Network, TechHire Oakland, Latinx in Tech, Kapor Center Innovation Lab. Lili is a proud immigrant from Bolivia who believes in fostering inclusive tech ecosystems for all.
Nupur Srivastava is Vice President of Product Management at Grand Rounds. She is responsible for product at Grand Rounds, leading a team of product managers, designers and growth marketers delivering end-to-end solutions that deliver improved health outcomes for members. Prior to Grand Rounds, Nupur was Head of Product for AliveCor, and held product positions in Cisco’s telemedicine group, as well as a product development company focused on affordable health technologies.
Omayeli Arenyeka is a Software Engineer at LinkedIn. Omayeli is an artist and technologist from Nigeria currently based in San Francisco. She is interested in the intersection of technology, art and activism. Her work outside of work aims to use writing, data, code and satire as tools to foster disillusionment with our current realities. She’s an alum of Code2040, the School of Poetic Computation and the Recurse Center.
Rosie Sennett is a Staff Sales Engineer at Splunk. She has shifted careers from Broadway Prop Builder to COBOL Programmer, and just missed the era of “mainframe punch cards” while following her nerdy side into the just burgeoning world of Business Intelligence. Rosie enjoys the puzzle solving heroics of tech support, and shifted again into Sales Engineering where she gets to dabble in everything and then pontificate about it. Fast forward 27 years, and she is enjoying her position as a Staff Sales Engineer at Splunk in San Francisco.
Sandra Lopez is Vice President for Intel Sports. Her team is focused on leading the business, marketing, and market development efforts of Intel Sports and Intel Studios to provide the future fans and consumers with the next generation of immersive media experiences. Previously, Sandra worked in Intel’s New Technology Group, leading and managing the Fashion wearable business.
Shanea Leven is Director of Product Management at Cloudflare. Prior to Cloudflare, Shanea was a Senior Technical Product Manager at eBay. Prior to eBay, Shanea was a Program Manager at Google, where she managed the Tech Entrepreneurship Nanodegree, a program aimed at teaching students how to build sustainable, revenue-generating businesses. Shanea is passionate about entrepreneurship as she began her career as an entrepreneur.
Shawna Wolverton is Senior Vice President of Product Management at Zendesk. She has over 20 years experience in enterprise software product management. Shawna recently joined Zendesk as the SVP of Product after a fantastic adventure in “new space” as the Chief Product Officer at Planet. Previously, Shawna spent 14 years at Salesforce, joining the organization as the first localization manager and leaving as an SVP of Platform product.
Sukrutha Bhadouria is CTO and co-founder of Girl Geek X, and a Senior Engineering Manager at Salesforce. She wants to change the world for girls, one geek dinner at a time, and she is passionate about technology, gender diversity, and engineering leadership. Sukrutha was named in Business Insider’s list of “30 Most Important Women Under 30 In Tech“ in 2014 and “San Francisco Business Times 40 Under 40” Tech Titans of 2016.
Sheri Trivedi is an Instructional Content Strategist at the United States Digital Service in Washington DC. She works with her colleagues at the USDS to bring user-centered design to federal government agencies in order to serve the people. She has spent her career deeply interested in creating positive new user experiences, having previously led initiatives at GitHub, Salesforce and Autodesk.
Don’t miss these 20+ amazing women speaking on March 8, 2019 (International Women’s Day) — get your FREE Elevate conference pass here and tune in to the livestream! #ggxelevate #iwd2019
You can host a viewing party at your office! Here’s a handy guide for you.
