Amanda Abiera has a BS in Biomedical Engineering from San José State University. Since 2015, she’s dedicated her time wearing multiple hats building up a medical device startup called, Shockwave Medical. In 2019, Shockwave Medical had a successful IPO and is currently on a massive upward trajectory. Amanda continues to learn and grow to maximize her potential. Amanda is a driven leader with a passion for creation and innovation.

Diana Acosta has spent over twelve years empowering research and development at NASA. She began her career as a researcher exploring advanced control and automation solutions for future aircraft. As opportunities arose, Diana found herself gravitating toward leadership roles and is proud to have catalyzed innovation by collaborative multi-disciplinary teams in autonomous systems, aviation and aerospace. Her advancements as an engineer and strategies as a leader have been shared in over two dozen publications. In 2019, Diana completed her Master of Science degree in Leadership and Strategy at London Business School. She also holds Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering from the University of California, Davis.

Shilpi Agarwal is a Social Impact Leader & CEO of Social Strategi LLC, a Social Enterprise that leads initiatives to help scale the impact of social good. One such Initiative is the Social Data for Social Good Initiative, a Free 10 Weeks Marketing Acceleration Program for nonprofits. Another Social Good Initiative led by her is the DataEthics4All Initiative with a mission to raise awareness for ethical data-driven practices. Shilpi is the driving force behind the first Data Ethics Advisory Council, an honorary advisory board that brings together brilliant business minds to help lead the responsible development of data ethics.

Shilpi is a firm believer in Social Good. She has taught at Stanford and UC Berkeley and is an MIT $100K Launch Mentor.

Emily is a licensed electrical engineer with 7+ years experience in utility scale PV and storage development. At 8minute, she leads the optimization engineering team, bridging the technical and commercial considerations throughout the development process. Emily is responsible for bankability and LCOE focused optimization, driving best in class design and financeability. Previously she led Performance Engineering and Technology Analytics at Recurrent Energy. Over the years, she has supported 2.5+ GW of PV projects through COD, and has contracted 1+GWh of energy storage. Emily holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Milwaukee School of Engineering and a M.S. from Stanford University focused on renewable energy systems and energy efficiency.

After contributing to Docker & Kubernetes for 3 years, Morgan has gained valuable insight into the varying culture around open source container technology. Pivoting towards blockchain technologies has landed Morgan in Hyperledger Fabric. Morgan is a maintainer on the core Docker Engine and also a founding contributor of the Kubernetes Service-Catalog.

Jill Bicknell, P.E., is a water resources engineer and manager at EOA, Inc. in Sunnyvale, CA. She has worked extensively in the areas of stormwater quality and flow controls, water pollution prevention, watershed management, and stormwater permit compliance for nearly 30 years, She has served as the Assistant Program Manager for the Santa Clara Valley Urban Runoff Pollution Prevention Program, an association of 15 local agencies, for over 20 years. She provides technical assistance, guidance and training to municipal agencies on implementation of low impact development techniques, green infrastructure planning and design, and stormwater capture and treatment. Jill has a B.S. in Environmental Engineering from Univ. of Vermont and a M.S in Water Resources Engineering from Stanford.

Kim Butts Pauly obtained a BS degree in Physics from Duke University and a PhD in Biophysics from the Mayo Graduate School. She is currently Professor in the Department of Radiology at Stanford University, with courtesy appointments in Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering. She directs the Radiological Sciences Laboratory. She is a fellow of the ISMRM, a member of the College of Fellows of AIMBE, and a Distinguished Investigator of the Academy of Radiology Research.

Rose Castanares is proud to lead a team of engineers (50% women!!) who are Sales Business Managers and Technical Managers. She joined TSMC in 1998 and is presently responsible for account management and sales for several systems and fabless customers. Before her promotion to TSMC Vice President in 2015, she served as Senior Director in TSMC North America’s San Jose office responsible for an account team and major, mid-size and emerging customers; in Austin as Central Region Director for Texas where she managed regional sales and support; and as Deputy Director in San Diego responsible for several customers in the region.

Prior to TSMC she was in account management with Chartered Semiconductor and National Semiconductor. She began her technology career as a manufacturing engineer with GTE and Siliconix.

Rose holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Inderpreet Chaggar is a SJSU alumni (go Spartans!) and received her M.S. from Cal. She has over 12 years of experience in executing Civil/Structural Engineering and Construction practices at various levels. She is currently a lead structural engineer with Carollo Engineers. At Carollo, she works with various municipalities, within and outside of California, to design/construct/retrofit water and wastewater facilities. Inderpreet also performs seismic evaluation and condition assessment of existing structures. Prior to Carollo, she was a blast-resistant engineer as part of Bechtel’s technical specialist team. On a personal note, she is currently training for her 3rd half marathon later this year.

Christina Chen is a construction program manager on the data center build team for Facebook. She oversees the strategic planning and launch of major retrofit projects across a growing global data center fleet. Before coming to Facebook, she spent her early career managing construction projects for commercial and heavy civil contractors. Originally a Texas native, Christina moved to California to pursue a B.S. in Civil Engineering at UC Berkeley and has called California home ever since. She also holds an M.S. in Civil Engineering from Stanford University and has served as an advisor to the SJSU chapter of Tau Beta Pi.

Darlene Damm is Chair and Faculty for Global Grand Challenges with Singularity where she helps innovators, companies and organizations use exponential technologies to solve the world’s most urgent social problems. Darlene has a broad background spanning across both technology and social change. In 2012, she founded DIYROCKETS, the first company to crowdsource R&D for 3D printed rocket engines, and in 2011 was an early co-founder of Matternet, one of the world’s first companies using drones for commercial transport and delivery of medical goods. Darlene served with Ashoka, the world’s largest association of social entrepreneurs for nearly ten years and spent over a decade working in Vietnam, Myanmar, Indonesia, East Asia and the US on educational and economic development programs.

Mia Dand is the CEO of Lighthouse3, a strategic research and advisory firm based in Oakland, California. Mia advises large organizations on responsible innovation at scale with new & emerging tech like Artificial Intelligence (AI). She has a successful track record of leading complex cross-functional programs at the intersection of business, data, and governance for global companies. Mia is the founder of the global Women in AI Ethics initiative, creator of the annual “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics” list, and Women in AI Ethics online directory, the leading resource for recognition, recruitment, and empowerment of talented women in this space.

A passionate Product Manager, Software Engineer and tech enthusiast, Natasha recently joined Wepay – a Chase company as a Technical Product Manager on their Risk Infrastructure team. Prior to that, she led the autonomous driving Data and Perception infrastructure teams at Apollo, Baidu USA. An ex Spartan graduating with a Masters degree in Software Engineering, Natasha worked as a Software Engineer prior to making the shift to Product Management.

Liv Erickson is an open-source virtual reality developer and advocates for creating inclusive social VR spaces. She is currently working as a senior product manager on the web-based social VR Hubs team at Mozilla. Previously, Liv worked as an engineering lead at the startup High Fidelity and as a technical XR evangelist at Microsoft. In 2016, she co-founded ARVR Academy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving representation in the immersive technology industry. Above all, Liv is focused on building technologies that improve the human experience in an ethical, sustainable way.

Soma has been practicing geotechnical engineering in the Bay area for over 30 years, working on a wide variety of projects from residential construction to bridges, dams and most recently the challenges of coastal engineering. Her career has focused on working as part of development teams in geologically challenging environments to aid in the design and construction of mitigations for a wide variety of geologic and geotechnical hazards. Her specialty and passion lie in the investigation, evaluation, and remediation of landslides.

Soma has a Master’s degree from the Department of Civil Engineering at San José State University. She highly valued the commitment of her professors who were able to model the balance between technical expertise and the practical world of engineering.

Governor Jerry Brown appointed Ellen Greenberg in 2016 as the Caltrans Deputy Director for Sustainability, a position created to lead the department’s efforts in developing and implementing initiatives to align with California’s goals on sustainability. Prior to joining Caltrans, Ellen was a Principal at Arup, working in San Francisco and London on major planning and infrastructure projects. Her career includes over three decades of work in the public, private and non-profit sectors. Ellen holds degrees in Geography, City and Regional Planning, and Transportation Engineering from UC Berkeley.

Ali Guarneros Luna currently works at the Office of Small Satellite Technology Program (SSTP) as a Program Manager at NASA Ames Research Center. She manages flight projects that are in the early development of maturity and are priority for the government and NASA. Ali was born in Mexico City and now lives in the Bay Area. She received her MS and MS degrees in Aerospace Engineering from SJSU in 2010 and 2013.

Mary Hoang is a Principal and Vice President with HydroScience Engineers, a civil and environmental engineering firm specializing in water-related projects. Mary has a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering and a Master’s in Public Administration from SJSU. Mary was the Operations Manager for potable and recycled water for the City of San Jose and Director of Water Quality for San Jose Water Company, one of the largest urban water retailers in the US. She has over 29 years of experience, primarily in water utility management and water resources. She has worked for both public and private water utilities, and her experience ranges from engineering capital and development projects to operating and maintaining both potable and recycled water systems.

Minna J. Holopainen is a dynamic leader with 25+ years of international experience in communication, marketing, and public relations spanning both private and public sectors. She is currently Vice President of Communication at a Silicon Valley cybersecurity startup Axiado. She also teaches a senior capstone class for communication majors at San José State University. Holopainen is a frequent speaker in professional lectures, panels, and conferences on a variety of communication and diversity topics. Her work has earned multiple awards, e.g., “Pride of San José Award” (2013) by the City of San Jose. Holopainen was named “The Most Influential Professor” by SJSU students in 2019.

Eurie Hong, Ph.D. is a scientist passionate about unlocking biological insights from genomic data. At Ancestry, she leads a team of scientists who leverage genomic data from 16+ million individuals, 100+ million pedigrees, and 20+ billion records to help individuals on their family history and health journeys. As a researcher in the Dept. of Genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine, Dr. Hong led teams who built bioinformatics tools to analyze & integrate functional genomics data. In addition, she has worked on methods to assign functional annotations in the genomes of diverse organisms, including baker’s yeast and humans. Dr. Hong received a B.S. with Honors in Biological Sciences at Stanford University and Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology at the University of Chicago.

Babita Jain is the Director of Quality for the Software and Informatics Division at Agilent Technologies. Babita has over 25 years of experience in software quality organizations with a reputation for designing, executing, and re-engineering testing processes to produce significant cost savings while driving successful development and launch of high quality, revenue-generating software products.

Prior to Agilent, she worked at HP Software where she was responsible for the quality of enterprise software products used by Fortune 500 companies.

Dr. Jorjeta Jetcheva is the Global R&D Lead for the Virtual Assistant portfolio of Accenture Operations, and is responsible for conceptualizing, building and deploying Virtual Assistants, AI-Powered Knowledge Platforms, and Agent Assist solutions. She has received multiple innovation and research awards, including recognition as a top 10 finalist in the Fujitsu Next-Generation Product Idea Contest (out of 454) in 2016 for her project “Robo Butler,” and the Best Paper Award at SmartGridComm 2014.

Dr. Jetcheva holds a PhD degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.A. degree in Computer Science (summa cum laude) and Mathematics from Mount Holyoke College.

Tanita Jha is a Senior Project Engineer working at Webcor Builders in the estimating and preconstruction department. Tanita graduated from San José State University in 2017 with a Bachelors of Science degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering. Since graduating, she has worked for San Jose Airport and Webcor Builders. Although not a native civil engineer, Tanita has applied knowledge of continuous improvement and project management to the construction industry. Tanita has a deep interest in environmental stewardship and is a LEED Green Associate and is part of Webcor’s Green Team.

Archana Kashikar is a Robotics Engineer currently working at Arevo Inc, a bay area startup which is pushing the boundaries of composite 3D printing using robotics and ultra-strong, lightweight materials. She is the main developer for robotic software solutions involving Robot motion planning and complex kinematics for true 3D printing, an area in which she holds several patents. She graduated from Santa Clara University in 2017 with a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering with a focus on Mechatronics and Robotics, where she published papers on multi-robot navigation systems and energy harvesting composites. She also holds an undergrad degree in Mechanical Engineering and Physics. She enjoys hiking and cooking with her family.

Maria Kazandjieva is an Engineering Manager at Netflix where her team builds and delivers the browser-based video playback engine for netflix.com. Over the last three years, Maria built out her team of 12 and worked on diverse projects including launching Netflix in cars, enabling non-members to sample Netflix content, and helping create the technology behind the interactive movie Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

Prior to that, Maria was a Senior Software Engineer working on adaptive video streaming algorithms. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University and an undergraduate degree from an all-women’s college on the East Coast.

On weekends, you can find Maria reading, kickboxing, snuggling her two cats – Foosball and Gemma, and learning to bake bread.

Maryam Khoshlahjeh is Propeller Integrity Lead at Joby Aviation, an eVTOL venture-backed startup in Santa Cruz, CA. Prior to joining Joby Aviation, Maryam worked at Sikorsky Aircraft as a Deputy Program Manager and Dynamics Lead. Maryam was the recipient of the 2016 Marshall-Tan Engineering Leadership Award and President’s Award in 2015 at Sikorsky . Maryam started her undergraduate education in Iran. She moved to the US and received her Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from San José State University. She started working as an Aerospace Engineer at Advanced Rotorcraft Technology Inc, in Sunnyvale, CA. She went on to receive a MS degree in Aeronautics & Astronautics from Stanford University and PhD degree in Aerospace Engineering from Penn State University.

Sharon Kim holds a M.S. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University, and a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins. As an Application Engineer at MathWorks in Santa Clara, she supports MATLAB users in image and signals processing, machine learning, deep learning, and more. Prior to joining MathWorks, she studied resting state brain activity patterns by applying analysis methods such as dimensionality reduction and unsupervised machine learning to wide-field optical image data.

25 years leading engineering teams in the development and release of process semiconductor equipment. Her current role is leading a global team of >300 engineers responsible for the concept, feasibility, development, design, and release of common subsystems used across Lam Research Product Divisions including mechanical, electrical, robotics and tool control software. Education: BS, Mechanical Engineering at CSU, Chico; MBA concentration managing innovation and technology, Santa Clara University.

Elizabeth (Liz) Kukka is VP of Operations at Pngme, Co-Founder at Masa Finance, advisor at EdgeMode, consultant at Compute Coin Network, and board member at Digital Custody Trust Company. She brings 12+ years of experience and expertise as an operator, investor, and mentor and speaks internationally on blockchain, crypto currency, women in tech, future technology, and investing. Before joining the world of blockchain, she was Head of Operations at Plug & Play Tech Center, one of Silicon Valley’s earliest and most respected tech accelerators. There, she supported startups in Healthcare & Wellness, Insurance, and Risk & Fraud and expanded the Sunnyvale office to 6 additional global locations.

Liz has her MBA in Design Strategy and currently resides in San Francisco, California.

Cynthia Kuo is a Corporate Entrepreneur and Innovation Lead at Infineon’s Silicon Valley Innovation Center. She develops partnerships with startups and academic groups to explore new applications for Infineon’s sensors. Previously, she co-founded Vibrado, a smart apparel startup. Vibrado’s smart garments track and interpret body motion to provide instant, actionable feedback. Six professional athletic teams in the NBA and MLB deployed Vibrado’s smart garments to help their players improve core skills. At Google, Cynthia created the first concept for Safe Browsing, a browser-based security warning that identifies phishing (web forgery) sites. Today, Safe Browsing is a part of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Gmail. It protects over four billion devices daily. Cynthia earned her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. from Stanford University.

Shu Liang is currently a research scientist at Facebook AR/VR. She earned her Ph.D. degree from Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington. She was part of the UW Reality lab. She earned her Bachelor’s Degree from Tsinghua University in 2013, majoring in EE.

Her research interest is mainly in computer vision and computer graphics area, specifically in 3D face analysis, 3D reconstruction, etc.

Vy Li is currently a managing member at Constellation FinTech Holdings and a Systems Engineering graduate student at Cal Poly Pomona. Constellation FinTech is an end-to end lending company, that provides the lending software platform and services for lenders and financial services. Vy specializes in US financial regulations, including state lending and debt settlement, compliance, risk and legal guidelines. Previously, Vy worked as a manufacturing engineer in aerospace and chemical industries. She has 4 kids, ages 3-11. Her kids keep her active and give her perspective at home, school and work.

Erica Lockheimer is Vice President of Engineering at LinkedIn. During her more than 10 years at the company, she built the Growth Engineering team into a high performing 120-person team, focused on increasing membership, and deepening member engagement. In January 2018, she was promoted to Head of Engineering for the LinkedIn Learning team, formerly known as Lynda.com. She is also responsible for LinkedIn’s Women In Tech (WIT) initiative, which is focused on empowering women in technical roles at the company. Prior to LinkedIn, she worked at Good Technology as Director of Server Engineering to securely manage and synchronize e-mail and calendar data between Exchange and mobile devices.

Erica loves the challenge of starting with something nascent and carving out the right strategy, hiring the best people, and plotting a course to drive results. In 2014 and 2015, Erica was recognized as one of the top 22 women engineers in the world by Business Insider.

Erica is a San Francisco Bay Area native, has 2 kids, loves to run and is a proud San José State University alumna with a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering.

Daphne leads efforts in natural language understanding and human computation at Google Research. Her expertise is in building technologies from the ground up, with experience across a range of startups and established companies. Daphne has led teams and delivered enterprise-grade platforms at Nest, [24]7.ai, Microsoft, and Tellme.

Daphne is an active community volunteer who advises social entrepreneurs across the globe through Santa Clara University’s GSBI program and mentors local AVID high school students. She has served on the board of Los Altos Art Docent and World Pulse, and the advisory board of El Camino Women Hospital, Needslist and SJSU Engineering IAC. She is the recipient of the President’s Volunteer Service Award and the Microsoft Silicon Valley Women’s Inspiration Award.

Anita Manuel is a career educator and administrator with 17 years of higher education experience serving students at various colleges and universities in the heart of Silicon Valley. She received her M.A. in Counseling from Santa Clara University with an emphasis in Career Development and currently serves as the Associate Director for Career Education at San José State University. Anita is dedicated to helping clients develop innovative strategies that support the creation of meaningful careers. Her specialties include strategic personal brand development and marketing, career design methods, curriculum development & instructional design.

Dr. Monica Martinez-Canales, Sr. Principal Engineer, is responsible for driving new opportunities in data analytics, AI/DL/ML algorithms, and mathematics-based breakthroughs for deployment in operational processes, software, platforms, accelerators or Silicon and driving new use cases for Edge-to-Data-Center data analytics, supporting software optimization on Intel Architecture, and providing insights on industry trends.

Monica earned a Ph.D. in Computational and Applied Mathematics from Rice University and received a B.S. in Mathematics from Stanford University. Monica has authored/co-authored over 80 reports, papers, and presentations and over 10 patent applications (with one in Autonomous Vehicles recently granted). Monica was named a HENAAC Luminary in 2007, named to Hispanic Business Magazine’s 25 Elite Women in 2009, and profiled in CAWIT’s Women Innovators Series in 2017. Monica has been a long-time STEM/STEAM advocate and mentor.

Kelly Masegian is the career counselor liaison to the College of Engineering serving over 5000 undergraduate students. Previously, she worked with the Foothill/DeAnza Internship program at NASA Ames serving as an internship coordinator for 5 years providing career guidance and supervision to up to 125 interns each session. As the mother of four, she is used to a fast-paced environment, and deeply believes in helping students learn to navigate and be proactive in their career planning.

Jacqueline McBride is a seasoned Immunologist and received her Ph.D. at the University of Vienna, Austria. She continued her post-doctoral studies at Stanford School of Medicine as well as further studies at Genentech primarily focused on human immunology and autoimmune disease. She currently holds the role of Associate Director and Senior Scientist at Genentech leading a group of biomarker scientists in the areas of Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Infectious diseases. She is passionate about delivering key scientific insights for enabling the development of new medicines and the future of personalized healthcare.

Neeta is an accomplished medical industry leader with over twenty years of global experience in diverse organizations from startups to large corporations. She joined Intuitive Surgical in Feb 2015 to form the Project Mgmt Office. Neeta was with Siemens for 12 years & had various leadership roles, from Business Head South Asia Cluster to Chief Information Officer within the Siemens Ultrasound Leadership Team, as well as, Senior Director of Product Management for Product, Portfolio & Strategy team at Siemens.

Neeta has an MBA from Santa Clara University and a BS in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Bombay, India

Jenny joins us from LinkedIn’s Global Real Estate Workplace team at their headquarters campus in Mountain View, California. She has more than twenty years experience in the construction industry leading projects throughout the Bay Area as concrete manufacturer, general contractor, client representative, and owner. With a passion for sustainability, Jenny is leading the concrete carbon reduction mission for LinkedIn’s new Mountain View headquarters building scheduled to open in 2021. Jenny earned a Master of Science degree in Environmental Studies with a Concentration in Sustainable Development and Policy from the University of Illinois, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Environmental Studies accompanied by a Minor in Business Administration from San José State University.

Rahima is a Senior Principal Engineer and leads the Customer Delight Office of Performance, Power and Competitive Analysis team of Intel Architecture Graphics Software team. She also serves as the Automation and Infrastructure Lead of the organization. Prior to this, she served as a Data Center Customer Solutions Technologist in the Manufacturing Validation Performance (MVP) team. Rahima led the data mining efforts on customer returned parts. She has been with Intel over 20 years after attending Graduate school at Yale. She also chairs various technical steering committees and serves on Industry advisory boards. She demonstrates consistent leadership in IP creation, and has published 100+ papers in Intel internal and external conferences and filed 5 patents. She is a diversity champion, and winner of the 2015 SWE PRISM award.

Maryam is Senior Battery System Engineer at Amazon Lab126. She did her Post doctoral study at MIT where she was working on Bio-templated materials for battery applications. She has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Maggie Neighbors is a Senior Scientist at Genentech, where for the past six years, she has led cross functional teams to develop biomarkers for therapeutics in respiratory diseases such as IPF. Prior to that, she was Director of Biology and Pharmacology in the biotech company Maxygen, discovering and developing next generation drug candidates for autoimmune disorders. She holds a PhD in Immunology from University Glasgow, Scotland, and completed her postdoctoral training in Immunology at DNAX Institute in Palo Alto, CA. She is a wife and mother of two teenage girls, and continues to be inspired to make them proud of her and to deliver science that helps get the right drug to the right patient at the right time.

Dr. Tina Panontin is a Professor of Practice in the College of Engineering at San José State University. She came to SJSU following a distinguished career at NASA Ames Research Center that included 17 years as Chief Engineer. With her extensive, practical experience in the engineering, development, and management of complex systems, Dr. Panontin supports the Dean and faculty by creating cross-discipline research concepts and strategic partnerships and integrating experiential work within standard curricula. She enjoys working with students, through instruction and advising, and provides them opportunities for internships and networking. Dr. Panontin earned her BSME from Santa Clara University, and her MS and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, both from Stanford University.

Jenifer Piccioni is a seasoned product management leader with 20 years of experience in the high-tech industry. With a career experience spanning various technologies such as voice, video, and security, she has guided the direction of product strategy for IoT at Cisco from concept to market. Jenifer is an advocate for women in technology, dedicating time to mentoring and supporting women in this field. Jenifer is a proud graduate of San Jose State University.

Ashley Pietz is a System Engineering Associate Manager at Lockheed Martin Space with thirteen years of experience in the Aerospace industry. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Materials Engineering from San José State University as well as a Master of Science in Engineering Leadership and Management from Santa Clara University. Ashley manages a team of eleven system engineers on the Next Gen Overhead Persistent Infrared (OPIR) program. Her career has grown from hands-on materials research and development to leading a multi-disciplinary team in the development of specialized spacecraft interfaces for a multi-billion-dollar satellite.

Dulce Ponceleón is a Principal Research Staff Member in the Scalable Knowledge Intelligence Group at IBM Research-Almaden. She is a Master Inventor, and a member of the IBM Academy of Technology. Her broad interests across different disciplines include natural language processing, machine learning, blockchain, and security. She led IBM’s Content Protection team resulting in significant contributions to Blu-ray Content Protection Standard’s consortium. While at Apple Computer, Inc., in the Advanced Technology Group, she contributed to QuickTime Conferencing’s video and audio compression. She received her Master’s degree and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. She earned her B.S. degree (Cum Laude) in Computer Science from Universidad Simon Bolivar, Caracas, Venezuela.

Lori leads the Global Customer Operations organization at Xilinx, responsible for demand management and fulfillment. She is passionate about building and transforming teams, working to define and execute a winning strategy. Prior to joining Xilinx, Lori has been a successful high-tech executive in a wide variety of positions including operations, marketing, sales, and engineering at startup and public companies including ECnet, Arrow Electronics, and Megatest. She holds an MBA from San José State University, as well as BS Marketing with Minor in Cybernetic Systems from San José State University.

Maureen Quinlan has held several roles at PG&E since 2013 including monitoring the wholesale electricity market, developing and executing the utility’s energy storage strategy, and deploying innovative pilot projects. Currently, she is a Principal Energy Transactions Analyst at PG&E, where she is responsible for procuring the company’s wholesale power purchase contracts including those for renewable energy and energy storage resources. Maureen is also a mentor for the U.S. State Department’s TechWomen initiative, empowering women leaders in STEM from Africa, Central and South Asia, and the Middle East. Maureen holds a Master of Environmental Management with a concentration in energy from Duke University, and a BA in Environmental Studies from the University of North Carolina.

Sree has 11 years of experience in New Product Development projects. She is presently working in the NPD group at Cepheid, to develop a new platform to enable viral and bacterial target detection for a multi disease panel assay with a new range of consumables. She has previously worked as a Senior R&D Engineer role at Beckman Coulter Life Sciences (a.k.a Labcyte). In that role, she was working on the Echo 525 product through its lifecycle. She also worked on developing new consumables to enable and expand Echo 525 capabilities in the genomics domain.

Sree received her MS in Chemical Engineering from San José State University, BS in Materials Engineering from Hyderabad, India.

Jayashree is Vice President of Interactive Design Tools team where she is responsible for Vivado tools that enable developers to realize their designs on Xilinx silicon platforms. She is a recipient of the 2011 Tribute to Women and Industry award from YWCA Silicon Valley. Jayashree holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Jessica Rosenthal is a Materials Engineer at Graniterock in Watsonville, CA. Her current focus is on building and road materials, including concrete, asphalt, and aggregates. Previously, her background in chemistry and materials, along with her interest in the development of technologies that help solve the world’s energy and resource challenges, led to R&D positions with renewable energy and water treatment startups. While managing family and kids, she has also taught Chemistry and Materials Engineering courses at DeAnza College, Cabrillo College, and San José State University. Jessica holds an MS in Chemistry from UC Santa Cruz and an MS in Materials Engineering from San Jose Staté University.

Meeta Roy is the Head of Strategy & Business Operations at Bose where she is responsible for defining and implementing the strategic objectives for the Consumer Wearable Audio division, and ensuring the team is firing on all cylinders to execute on goals. Prior to Bose, Meeta was the Chief of Staff at Jawbone where she was a strategic partner to the executive staff in driving operational excellence, innovation, and program management.

Meeta is also the founder of MERORA, an apparel and accessories brand that encourages a culture of innovation & advocacy. Her designs that range from celebrating women in tech, to advocating for equality and rising up together, to promoting inclusion and diversity in STEM fields. She received her BSEE from SJSU in 2003.

Melissa Ruhl recently joined Ford in Palo Alto as an Emerging Mobility Researcher. Previously, she was a Senior Planner for Arup in San Francisco where she managed projects on transportation innovation. She regularly speaks in California and nationally on autonomous vehicles and the future of cities. She has published a number of articles on future mobility and most recently co-authored a chapter on mobility as a service in the recently published Disruptive Transport: Driverless Cars, Transport Innovation and the Sustainable City of Tomorrow. In September 2019, Melissa was recognized on the “40 under 40” Mass Transit magazine list.

Gity Samadi received her Ph.D. in Engineering Physics from Vienna University of Technology in Vienna, Austria.
She is an R&D Program Manager at Semi and responsible for the flexible hybrid electronics R&D. Prior to Semi, she held various positions in the HDD industry ranging from NPI and test engineer to management and program management in companies such as IBM, Hitachi Global Storage (HGST), Western Digital and Headway (TDK).

Anisha Seli graduated Summa Cum Laude from SJSU in the Summer of 2010 with an MS in Electrical Engineering, that same year she had her first child and decided to spend a year as a stay at home mom.

She joined the Failure Analysis team at Maxim Integrated in 2012, where she is now a principal technical leader. She loves working on tough technical challenges, debugging silicon failures which require expertise across various electrical engineering domains and credits SJSU with providing her a solid foundation that enables her to do so. She also mentors junior engineers in the team and is passionate about promoting and encouraging women in tech. Outside of work, she enjoys painting, singing, cooking, fundraising and raising awareness for social causes and spending time with her family.

Ms. Sumaya Shakir is Vice President of Information Technology at GlobalLogic Inc, San Jose, California. She has over twenty years of global experience in business strategy and enterprise technologies. She is passionate about technology, strategy, and leadership. Her current key areas of interest are emerging technologies related to all things AI and Quantum Computing.

She received her Bachelors (BS) degree with honors in Computer Engineering from Bharadidasan University, India and her Masters (MS) degree in Enterprise Software technologies from San José State University. She attended Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University for her executive MBA.

She is a voracious reader and enjoys outdoor adventures. She takes pride in mentoring individuals wishing to succeed in STEM careers.

Aparna Sinha is Director of Product at Google Cloud and is the product leader for Application Development Platforms. Her teams are focused on transforming the way we work through innovation in platforms. She helped build Anthos / Kubernetes into a widely adopted transformation engine for platform teams across industries. She joined Google from NetApp where she was Director of Product for storage automation and private cloud. Prior to NetApp, Aparna was a leader in McKinsey and Company’s business transformation office working with CXOs on IT strategy, pricing, and M&A. Aparna holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and has authored several technical publications. She is Chair of the Governing Board of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Jayanthi is passionate to improve Healthcare through data-driven innovative solutions that allow researchers to gain useful insights in understanding a disease and its cause and to develop treatment.

As an organizational and people leader, Jayanthi builds and leads high performing multi-domain and cross functional teams to create platforms and infrastructure that enable drug discovery and development processes. As an Engineer, she has for the last 18 years worked in the BioTech industry developing solutions to support Early Discovery, Preclinical and Clinical stages of drug development and progression.

Education: MS, computer engineering, San José State University; BS, Electronics and Communication, Government College of Technology, India

Betty Chun-Jung Tai is a Research Scientist at Facebook who works on virtual reality and brings hand tracking to Oculus Quest. Before joining Facebook, she received a PhD degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Sandra Tang is a research scientist in Agilent Research Labs, part of Agilent Technologies. Her current role involves investigating leading-edge technologies that will differentiate her company’s products from its competitors. During her tenure at Agilent Technologies, she has contributed firmware and software to several products in their mass spectrometry, pathology, and genomics divisions. Prior to joining Agilent, she was a research scientist and systems engineer with Lockheed Martin.

Sandra holds a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a BS in Chemistry from UCLA.

As the VP of Operations for VMware’s global R&D organization, Sonar spearheads strategy planning, business analytics and governance, and business transformation initiatives. Her team plays a critical role in defining and driving strategic, operational, and organizational excellence to scale the business with speed and deliver aggressive growth. What gets Sonar excited every day is sharing personal stories, pushing and stretching herself and her team to question the status quo and find new ways to solve problems.

Prior to her current role, Sonar spent almost 19 years at Cisco in various Engineering and Operations roles for multiple multi-billion dollar businesses including Data Center, IoT, and Networking.

Sonar is passionate about mentoring and sponsoring women in tech. She actively engages in various mentoring activities across VMware and her broader community. Sonar was recognized by Silicon Valley Business Journal as a Woman of Influence in 2020, awarded the YWCA Silicon Valley’s TWIN award in 2019, and was a fellow with the International Women’s Forum leadership foundation in 2018-2019.

Sonar holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Engineering from San Jose State University.

Sarah Wolfe Carr is a Product Manager for Bose Corporation, focused on open-ear audio. She recently served as the Program Manager for Bose Frames, which launched worldwide in 2019 and was named one of TIME’s Best Inventions. She is now responsible for product management and new concept development across the product line. Before coming to Bose, Sarah worked as a Program Manager across many different product categories like cosmetics, wearables, autonomous vehicles, smart-kitchen devices, and audio, and also spent time at a consultancy specializing in industrial design and product innovation. Sarah’s passion lies in finding creative ways to streamline workflows, increase team efficiency, and make cool things with even cooler people.

Anthurine Xiang graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University and Johns Hopkins University. Prior to founding QuarkChain, she has two years of working experience in finance on Wall Street and 6 years in the tech industry in Silicon Valley.

QuarkChain is the first public chain to implement state sharding. QuarkChain makes customization available for four factors: consensus, token economy, virtual machines, and ledger model. QuarkChain has become a flexible, scalable, and user-friendly blockchain with a highly secure, decentralized, and highly efficient underlying architecture. https://quarkchain.io/

Ellie Yieh is corporate vice president for Advanced Product Technology Development within the New Markets and Alliances organization at Applied Materials, Inc. She is responsible for the technical excellence of the company’s state-of-the-art Maydan Technology Center R&D lab and works closely with customers and business units to drive advanced product development and technology roadmaps. In addition, she leads the company’s R&D efforts for developing new innovations that will drive future business opportunities. She is also a board member for Applied Ventures, LLC, the company’s venture capital fund. In 2018, Yieh was awarded the honorary designation of Applied Materials Fellow for her outstanding technical contributions that have been vital to the company’s success.
Ellie is a member of the advisory boards for UC Berkeley’s the College of Chemistry and the Silicon Valley Women in Engineering group at San Jose State University. She received a bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering from UC Berkeley and holds more than 100 semiconductor engineering patents. In 2016, she was inducted into the Women in Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame for outstanding contributions to scientific and technological communities that improve society and business, and for her commitment to supporting and mentoring women and girls worldwide. She was also named one of the 2015 “Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology” by the National Diversity Council, and a 2010 “Woman Worth Watching” by Profiles in Diversity Journal magazine.

Zhan Yu is the Senior Director of Engineering at Marvell Semiconductor. At Marvell, she built and led cross-functional cross-geographic R&D organizations to design, develop high-performance, mixed-signal IPs. Before that, Zhan was the Director of Digital Power at Monolithic Power Systems. She set up global design centers and led the team to prototyped MPS’ 1st digitally controlled DC-DC converters into products.

Zhan holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, UCLA, and MBA degrees from INSEAD and Tsinghua University in Tsinghua-INSEAD EMBA program. She founded the Coaching Center at Tsinghua x-lab and has been an avid mentor for women’s leadership development and coaching young entrepreneurs.

Joumana Zeid has 15 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry working on drug and combination product development. She started her career at Genentech where she held a variety of roles in Bioprocess Development, Device Development, and Portfolio Management & Operations. Joumana then transitioned to working for smaller companies including Plexxikon and Achaogen where she had Project Management and Team Leadership roles. She is currently a Director and Project Team Leader in the Product and Portfolio Management organization at Aimmune Therapeutics where she is responsible for leading the cross-functional early development teams that develop the company’s clinical assets. Joumana has an MS in Chemical Engineering from SJSU and an MBA from UNC Kenan-Flagler.