Global Advisory Board

Bhawna Paul currently heads IT Strategy at Boehringer Ingelheim, where she defines how IT can
deliver maximum value to the organization and its customers in anticipation of fast-moving business drivers. She has spearheaded a number of transformation initiatives in and beyond IT, from digital innovation strategy, governance and operating models to flexible skills building. Recently, Bhawna was recognized as a proponent of positive change as part of Boehringer Ingelheim’s win in the Strategy category of CIO.de’s 2020 Digital Leader Award.
Prior to her time in Germany, Bhawna lived and worked in the New York tristate area for 15 years,
building deep experience delivering technology strategy, solutions and services for healthcare and
finance as a Senior Manager in Capgemini’s Business Information Management practice. She
considers New York her “sweet spot” as this is where her son was born and where she found an
abundance of like-minded people with the passion and drive to make a difference.
Bhawna is passionate about ensuring the Next Gen has the brightest possible future, through
mentoring at work, organizing weekend programs for children in her community, and supporting
organizations with a focus on children’s education.

Rutuja is a Sr. Principal Software Engineer at Oracle Analytics Cloud where she leads development of next generation Analytics Cloud features. Prior to Oracle, she was a part of the Social Platform Team at Niantic Labs (Pokemon Go Maker). Rutuja has 10+ years of experience building scalable and distributed platforms. She has been extensively building containerized scalable applications on top of various public cloud platform for over a year and a half.
Rutuja is passionate about mentoring and coaching women in technology. She volunteers with the “BUILT BY GIRLS” organization to mentor aspiring young women who want to launch their career in the software development. She has conducted a Docker and Kubernetes beginners workshop at Womxn in Games 2020 Conference. She has a Masters in Computer Science degree from University of Southern California and a Bachelors in Computer Engineering degree from the University of Pune, India. 

Deepna Devkar is Vice President of Data Science & Engineering and heads up the Data Intelligence team. She works to understand the CNN audience across devices and build recommendation systems that increase user engagement across all CNN brands.

Prior to joining CNN, Devkar started as Vice President of Data Science Products for WarnerMedia, where she led a team of data scientists, engineers and product managers to build scalable data science products across WarnerMedia’s brands. She also held positions at Viacom and Dotdash (formerly about.com) where she attained expertise in the linear TV space and digital media and publishing landscape, respectively. Before her transition into data science, she spent over a decade in scientific research, studying the psychological and neural underpinnings of human behaviour.

Recently, she was recognized for her contribution as Folio’s Top Women in Media, Corporate Champion in 2018. Devkar has enjoyed working on projects ranging across audience segmentation, content recommendation and personalization, search engine and revenue optimization. She is most passionate about evangelizing data science and regularly speaks at meetings and conferences.

Sadia has a wealth of experience in the payments industry. She started her career as a developer and moved through several roles before settling at Mastercard. In her current role she works with the Bacs team to ensure an inclusive environment for all and a sustainable delivery pace to benefit the end customers. Vocalink, a Mastercard company operates as the critical national infrastructure for the UK payments system.

Sadia enjoys keeping fit, spending time with her children and husband and working with the local charities. She works with a local community group to help the homeless and acts as a local emergency volunteer.

Fariha is an empathetic and collaborative leader who thrives in innovation-led organizations. As an expert in Engineering, R&D and Program Management, she has led the development of innovative marketing solutions for the healthcare, insurance and consumer industries. Also, as an agile pioneer, she has increased product velocity by setting up fast-paced development programs across multiple geographies. Her career spans large companies, startups, non-profits and government organizations.

Previously, as Partner, Product & Program Velocity at Digital Innovation Inc, she worked to create an innovative product design and development process to complement the firm’s internationally recognized corporate innovation framework. Most recently, Fariha has joined Eli Lilly as a Senior Director & Global Platform Leader: Connected Care.

Liz is a Senior UX/UI Designer who is passionate about human-centered design, research, and solving problems. She's currently busy with a PhD thesis in design, has summited Mt Kilimanjaro, and plays violin in various orchestras. She strives to create beautiful and intuitive experiences on any platform, and to always fight for the people that will actually be using the solutions we create.

Keerthana is an IT Infrastructure Architect in Edge-Cloud computing at Bosch, Germany. She pursued her M.Sc. in Communication Engineering at RWTH Aachen, Germany and has acquired a profound knowledge in communication and computation technologies over her years of experience in research and advance development domains. Concurrently, she is pursuing her PhD in Edge computing in the context of Industry 4.0. 
She brings her experience into full play in her role as IT Architect by introducing cutting-edge cloud technologies in manufacturing plants and accelerating the realization of Industry 4.0 at Bosch.
She also plays an active role in fostering the Women at Bosch to stay competitive and on a par with Men in the technical domains. 
In her free time she trains for triathlon and she is a passionate hiker. 

Angie Westbrock is an innovative and analytical operations leader specializing in scaling teams, culture and business operations to support massive growth and rapid change.  She has more than 18 years of experience leading large, diverse organizations spanning tech, food and beverage, and health and wellness industries.  Broad areas of expertise include finance, supply chain, logistics, strategic planning, and compliance.  
Angie currently serves as the VP of Global Operations and the Head of the Covid Response Taskforce for Lyft.  Previously,  Angie was the Chief Operating Officer of Habit, LLC, the first personalized nutrition company.  Prior to this, she started up West Coast Operations for HelloFresh.  Angie earned her degree in Chemical Engineering and spent the first 10+ years of her career in operations leadership in large scale consumer goods companies including Anheuser-Busch and Sara Lee.

Vinitha Simon is a technology leader focusing on the next gen banking architecture and delivering platforms which help to simplify the banking lifestyle. She is a thought leader and hopes to revolutionize the regulated financial industry with a vision of a unified digital identity for a customer across all banks. She is a strong advocate of Women in Tech with the aspiration of helping women become the most talented version of themselves and encouraging women to transition to a technology career. Vinitha graduated with a Computer Science degree from Anna University, India and currently works as a Director of Software Engineering at Capital One.

Joanne Thurlow is Head of IT for Siemens Energy, Industrial Application Solutions – a global engineering organization providing electrification, automation, and digitalisation solutions to the energy industry. 

With a career that has spanned multiple roles, organizations, and countries starting in her home country of Canada, UK, Norway and Germany, Joanne has experienced many challenges and rewards on route.  

While the technologies have changed and evolved along the way, one thing has remained constant – success depends on the individuals, the teams and then technology. Even the smallest of teams can achieve enormous results in a rapidly changing world through the technology, methodology, and a healthy amount of resourcefulness and inspiration. This can be foundational to securing a sustainable future for all. 

A research and scientific leader in Artificial Intelligence, Alessandra is the Director of AI and Data Science at Shutterstock. Alessandra has over 10 years’ experience in research and innovation gained whilst working in academic and commercial environments. Alessandra is passionate in advanced analytics, machine learning, and computational models with the focus of transferring innovation from research to products.

Alessandra is the Ambassador of Women in AI Ireland (a nonprofit do-tank working towards gender-inclusive AI that benefits global society) promoting a strong community of women and minorities in Ireland by providing means for growing knowledge and expertise in AI thanks to the strong support of  the government, academia and private enterprises.

In her previous appointment Alessandra was Head of Analytics Research at Nokia Bell Labs where she was leading research teams in several locations and developing a successful strategy for the Data Analytics division while driving changes across different activities like her contributions to the Nokia AI Ethics Advisory Board

Rozemarijn Koppenaal, Global Vice President E-Commerce for Coty. Rozemarijn is a business- and brand leader with 15+ years’ experience in the Consumer Goods industry. Today, she’s heading the worldwide indirect E-Commerce organization for Coty, out of the HQ in Amsterdam. Rozemarijn started her career in Procter & Gamble, where she was inspired for life about the power of building exceptional talent and a supporting community as a catalyst for transformational business growth. Talent- and community development also stretches out over the non-corporate part of her life, as she raises her two daughters of 5 and 7 years old, mentors actively and started supporting female-founded startups. Rozemarijn is Dutch and moved back to her home country two years ago after having lived in Switzerland for many years.

Co-Founder at Custodian, Nathalia Rus is utilising a new native & distributed graph database to build a knowledge graph around physical assets.