Sophie Ross is the Global CEO of the Technology segment within FTI Consulting. She has more than 20 years of experience in company management, strategic leadership and operations in the Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Ms. Ross specializes in helping clients manage their data in the context of compliance and risk, and leads global Technology segment strategy and execution across Information Governance, Privacy & Security, Digital Forensics & Investigations, E-Discovery Consulting & Services, Managed Review, Corporate Legal Operations and Blockchain and Digital Assets practices. Her consulting expertise includes e-discovery and high-stakes document review through predictable pricing models, applying analytics and simplifying the complex layers of discovery management.
Join Sophie's session 'Altered State: Digital Risk Management in the Wake of Business Disruption and Technology Acceleration'
Jameeka Green Aaron is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Customer Identity Cloud - Auth0, a product unit of Okta. She is responsible for the holistic security and compliance of Auth0’s platform, products, and corporate environment.
She is a recognized industry leader and brings 25 years of experience to the role, with a career that has spanned a wide variety of industries in both information technology and cyber security, including aerospace and defense, retail, and manufacturing, at both Fortune 100 and privately held companies—including Nike, Hurley, Lockheed Martin, and the U.S. Navy.
Jameeka lives in Irvine, CA, with her husband Amilcar who serves as Diversity Equity and Inclusion Commission for the City of Irvine. She is committed to advancing women and people of color in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. She has participated in the U.S. State Department’s TechWomen program, the National Urban League Young Professionals and the National Society of Black Engineers. She is an advisor for U.C. Riverside Design Thinking Program, a board member of Digital Brands Group, a member of Chief and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.
Elaine Zhou is the Chief Technology Officer for Change.org, the world’s largest nonprofit-owned tech platform for social change with more than 450 million users worldwide. As Change.org's technical leader, Elaine leads a global engineering team of 70+ and growing to drive Change.org to the forefront of responsible AI, elevate the platform capability and scalability utilizing distributed cloud infrastructure, and engage repeat users through accessibility and a delightful experience.
Join Elaine's session 'Creating Richer Automation Solutions'
Helen Holder is the Chief Technologist for HP Personal Systems. In her time at HP, she has built a track record of delivering innovative products, features, and services based on high-impact technologies, including new computing architectures, IOT, printed electronics, and displays. She also leads HP's long-term research on the future of compute.
Before becoming Chief Technologist, Helen was a Distinguished Technologist in HP Labs, where she was a thought leader on ambient and distributed computing. Prior to that, her early career included groundbreaking work in sustainability, which led to her appointments to the National Academies of Science committee on the Evaluation of Safer Chemical Substitutions and the California Green Ribbon Science Panel, advising the state on green chemistry and alternatives assessment.
Helen received her Bachelor of Science from MIT and her Master of Science from the University of California, Berkeley. She has written many technical papers and holds 21 patents.
Fun Fact: I'm a professional singer and conductor.
Teresa Dietrich is the Chief Product & Community Officer at Stack Overflow, where she is responsible for evolving and executing Stack Overflow's product strategy.
Previously she worked at McKinsey New Ventures as Global Head of Product & Engineering, where she played an instrumental role in creating and scaling their B2B SaaS products, built and led product development teams across the globe, and fostered a culture that attracted and developed top talent. Prior to McKinsey New Ventures, Teresa was Chief Technology Officer at Namely, and held several leadership roles at WebMD and AOL. Teresa is a Board Member for the Oklahoma School of Science and Math Foundation, the technical magnet high school that ignited her passion for learning and technology.
Teresa earned her Master of Science from George Mason University and continued on as an adjunct professor; she earned her bachelor's degree from Carnegie Mellon University.
Join Teresa's session 'Building the Future of Work without Burning Out Your Workforce'
As Senior Vice President of Corporate Operations Strategy, Leah drives Oracle's business operations and M&A integration strategies. This includes a focus on the operational changes required across Oracle's people, processes, and systems to support customer success, partner success, employee success, and ultimately, Oracle's ongoing growth and operational excellence. In addition, Leah is responsible for strategic communications and Oracle's executive sponsorship program, which matches Oracle executives to strategic clients to ensure they maximize their investments and achieve superior value.
Since 2014, Leah and her team have managed the integrations of more than 20 acquired companies, valued at more than $15 billion, and they have led Oracle's transformation from a product-oriented company to a service-oriented company, with a multi-billion dollar cloud business that is growing rapidly.
Join Leah's session 'Fireside Chat: Creating Valued Customer-Enabled Technical Teams'
Happy has undertaken a variety of technical roles through her 20+ year career, starting as a developer and growing into a seasoned executive leader. She's participated in companies in various tech sectors including financial, enterprise, and business to business. She's also built and managed teams in companies at various stage of growth including series A+ start-ups all the way through large public businesses. PayPal, ServiceNow, Fortinet, and Everbridge are but a few. Keys to Happy's success include a skillful ability to identify and apply technical talent and a strong customer-centric business acumen. Knowing what your customers want, and what motivates your teams, and being able to combine those is a rare and powerful talent.
Fun Fact: Happy was born in Shanghai. Despite being born in China, she received her English name, "Happy", because her parents wished her happiness throughout her life. Her Chinese name, "Haibei", followed her English name. Happy is a big foodie and loves to chase amazing restaurants around the world and to cook amazing meals of her own.
Join Happy's session 'Fireside Chat: Creating Valued Customer-Enabled Technical Teams'
Maria is MuleSoft's VP of Engineering at Salesforce where she leads a distributed organization of 200+ engineers across North America and Argentina. MuleSoft is in the forefront of application integration and hyperautomation. As a technical leader, Maria focuses on enabling MuleSoft's customers to automate their software systems, regardless of whether they are on-prem, in the cloud, or legacy.
Prior to MuleSoft, Maria spent 5 years in Salesforce Analytics Cloud where she led an engineering team in the Data Platform area. The portfolio of products she was responsible for included a cloud ETL tool, external connectors, data prep tool with ML, and integration with Salesforce’s ecosystem.
Earlier in her career, Maria worked on various database products.
Fun Fact: Maria has a Bachelor of Arts in Music Performance. She dreamt of playing the bassoon in the New York Philharmonic which was never realized. Today she uses her performance skills regularly in her role as an engineering leader.
Join Maria's workshop 'Lightning Talk: Embracing Automation - Key to Scaling Your Business' (Exclusive to Premium Ticket Holders Only)
A Global executive in leading strategy, planning and transformations, while driving product/program portfolio with operational excellence in high growth mode. Driving change in ambiguous and conflicting environments while leading global cross functional teams in highly matrixed and complex organizations.
Proven to deliver business results with strong business partnership and "customer first" mindset. Leadership in driving complex initiatives that require strategic change management, to develop the change vision for success, implementable roadmaps for the "big picture", and attain measurable business outcomes.
Fun Fact: I have visited more countries in the world than states from my home country!
Join Rani's workshop 'How To Lead Complexity Globally During Highly Uncertain and Disruptive Times' (Exclusive to Premium Ticket Holders Only)
Priya Devanand is an Engineering leader with extensive experience driving application security through Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL) processes and delivering several billions of dollars worth of products with robust security and privacy capabilities. She spearheaded the development of cryptographic protocols, crypto key and certificate management, authentication, privacy-preserving techniques and identity management solutions. Priya has headed secure SDLC processes and application security initiatives to scale through automation, training and definition of well-defined secure development processes.
Join Priya's workshop 'Lightning Talk: Evolution of Security' (Exclusive to Premium Ticket Holders Only)
Nupur Srivastava has 20 years of experience working for Microsoft, Google and Cigna and other companies in Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals, and Consumer Products. Her immense customer focus and her work experience in leading teams, business and technology with resilience have guided her career journey. She is a Director Technology Strategist, as Client facing CTO leading one of the largest customers for Microsoft. She Engages with Business and Technical leaders helping them digitally transform their business with the next generation innovation. She has a deep technical expertise in Big data and AI and has been a chief architect for several large-scale platform implementations like customer 360, ML and Data fabrics. Nupur speaks in various conferences like MS Inspire, Digital Transformation Academy, Women in AI guiding on individual career Transition journey. Nupur is an Electrical and Computer Engineer and has an executive master's in technology management from Columbia University.
"My Purpose is to overcome social barriers by building allainces and by empowering individuals and organizations to achieve more through Inspiration, Innovation and Impact."
Fun Fact: I love to Ski and I am able to ski down some of the most difficult terrains today, but I fell over a 100 times while learning it five years ago!
As a Global Client Director, Christine Soussa consistently delivers exceptional value through a customer-for-life approach focused on cultivating long term relationships. With over 25+ years' experience in sales, strategy, alliance and business development, and leadership, she uses her passion for working alongside people and enthusiasm for technology to deliver significant impact to her customers, community, teams, and organizations.
As a leader at Equinix, the world's leading digital infrastructure company, she helps enterprises define and execute their digital, business, and cloud strategies. Her standards for excellence paired with her curious entrepreneurial nature and "unlimited mindset" results in meaningful business outcomes. She enjoys deconstructing and unraveling complexity to discover a valuable path forward, especially in our ever-evolving world.
Cia is the Director of Engineering and Operations for T-Mobile building one of the fastest 5G networks in the world. Cia has been in the wireless industry for over 17 years working with several telecommunications and engineering companies, including Metro PCS, AT&T, Black & Veatch and T-Mobile.
She holds a B.A in Sociology, Master's in Political Science and Doctorate of Jurisprudence, as well as a certificate from Yale in Fostering Diversity and Inclusion. She uses both her legal and political interest in siting advocacy to bridge the gaps between municipalities, private and public sectors for wireless facilities in order to achieve one of the most expedient build-outs of a telecommunication network in California.
Her past personal, professional experience and education allows her to see the world through many lenses giving space for complex viewpoints from social, political and legal perspectives. She is a passionate champion of change for diversity and inclusion and one of the driving forces behind T-Mobile's Women in Technology's diversity and inclusion community.
For fun, Cia hosts a podcast called, The Cogent Code, which offers perspective on a variety of topics in a humorous and educational way.
Join Cia's workshop 'Developing Executive Presence in a Technical Space' (Exlusive to Premium Ticket Holders Only)
Michel Narganes is a partner in Manatt's San Francisco office. She has guided venture-backed startups and other, established clients—including various technology companies, media and gaming ventures, financial institutions, health care companies and others—through licensing, technology and commercial transactions, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), financing matters, and developer and publisher agreements for more than 15 years.
Michel also works with disruptors in the growing cryptocurrency space with respect to blockchain-based technologies and transactions in the Web3 ecosystem. She was an early mover in this area, representing the platform that facilitated the highly publicized sale of an American digital artist’s nonfungible token (NFT) artwork in the first digital auction held by one of the largest global auction houses. She is sought after for her business-minded counsel on the convergence of cryptocurrency with other emerging industries, including the rise of tokenization in gaming and transactions in the nascent metaverse.
Before joining Manatt, Michel served as in-house counsel at a large technology company, where she played a key role in the growth of global strategic partnerships, M&A and corporate compliance operations. Michel is also an entrepreneur, having founded her own legal services firm, providing her firsthand experience tackling the gamut of challenges emerging companies face throughout their life cycles.
Maryanna Saenko is an early-stage venture capitalist and cofounder of Future Ventures. She invests in frontier technologies that make the world a better place, and don't prey on human frailty. Recent investments have been across a wide swath of sectors, including nuclear fusion, sustainable agricultural and land management, bee immunology, women's reproductive longevity, and the application of AI to everything from the construction industry to medical therapeutics.
Previously she was at Khosla Ventures, and prior to that DFJ. She was also an investment partner at Airbus Ventures where she led a series of venture investments strategically aligned with Airbus' future-of-aerospace initiatives. Before Airbus, Maryanna was a consultant at Lux Research and a research engineer at Cabot Corporation. She’s worked on lunar rovers, martian landers, driverless cars, and long-range low-frequency communication systems.
Maryanna graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a BS in BioMedical Engineering and a BS and MS in Materials Science and Engineering.
Sasha is a C-Suite Executive, who has led marketing communications strategies, influencing pop-culture trends combining fashion, sustainability and technology for over a decade. A curator and futurist, she has connected physical, digital, and virtual experiences at global brands, agencies and start-ups, in-house at H&M, Nike, SOREL, Superplastic, and agency side, at HAVAS. Her Web3 journey began in 2015, when founding Blockchain Style Lab, to using blockchain data to inform design and transparency and build community in the wearable fashion space.
This has evolved to launching NFT, gaming and metaverse solutions for heritage brands who are entering the Web 2.5 space. Sasha has been invited to speak globally at CES, New York, London, Paris and Milan Fashion Weeks, Economist Impact, SXSW, Sundance Film Festival, Web Summit, House of Beautiful Business and translating Web3 on podcasts and media interviews.
Fun Fact: In addition to her work in Web3, Sasha is an avid health and wellness advocate, who spends her free time outdoors, hiking, kayaking and exploring new natural ecosystems.
Join Sasha's roundtable 'Strategically Implementing The Metaverse' (Exclusive to Premium Ticket Holders Only)
Carrie and the PowerSpeaking, Inc. team are passionate about helping organizations—at corporations like Genentech, eBay, Autodesk, and Gilead Sciences—develop powerful communication skills that inspire people and get results.
"A large part of our client base is in the high-tech and biotech sectors, so many years ago, we researched and developed HighTechSpeaking®, which helps technical professionals become more clear, strategic, high-impact communicators," Carrie says. "And in 2018, we launched Confident Speaking for Women, to meet the unique challenges women face in the workplace. Both are now among our most popular programs."
Prior to joining PowerSpeaking, Carrie enjoyed more than 30 years' experience in the learning and development industry, where she led award-winning teams. Then, as now, she believes that "Our purpose is to make great people even greater at what they do every day."
Fun Fact: Outside of work, Carrie loves watching her son compete in the 800 run.
Shanelle has spent 17 years working across several industries with companies at various stages. From building the People function infrastructure from scratch to helping scale companies for high growth, her passion for people and innovation has shown through in every aspect of her roles and allowed her to help organizations build long-term value. She is currently the Chief People Officer of PresenceLearning, an EdTech Saas company with a workforce that is 75% women and 50% women at the executive level.
Fun Fact: Shanelle is a 22 year Golden State Warriors season ticket holder and shot a social media commercial with Klay Thompson.
Amy is such a stellar coach and trainer, she heads up all US trainer certifications and mentoring for PowerSpeaking, Inc. In addition, she leads fundamental and executive-level presentation skills workshops for technical and non-technical audiences. She also provides one-on-one coaching for those preparing for conferences or other specialized presentations.
Amy began her career in nonprofit literacy and taught public speaking for the communication studies department of several colleges. She has a passion for working with adults and children whose native language is not English. She has developed and leads public-speaking workshops for advanced ESL students; trains elementary school faculty and students in public speaking; and coaches an award-winning elementary speech and debate team.
Fun Fact: If a swing song comes on, you can guarantee Amy will be dancing with a big smile on her face.
Susannah Baldwin, Ph.D. is a seasoned executive and communication coach who combines her experience as a clinical psychologist with corporate expertise to help clients lead diverse teams in demanding environments. She has a track record of 15 years working in top technology and biotech companies. She is the author of Women, Language and Power: Giving Voice to Our Ambition, a new book adapting her popular workshop for women leaders into lessons for all career stages.
Fun Fact: Hosted a weekly radio show - "Parent Talk" - interviewing authors for 7 years.
Join Susannah's workshop 'Defining and Presenting Your Message For Senior Leaders' (Exclusive to Premium Ticket Holders Only)
As an engineering leader with over 20 years experience at top companies including Apple and Stripe, Tara has experienced the challenges of developing products in high pressure environments. Her experience includes leading the software performance team for the first Apple Watch, running the mobile team at Stripe, and setting direction as the VP of Engineering at LTSE. She is a Co-active trained coach, combining well established coaching methods with her own insights.
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