Meet the Speakers

Michelle McKenna serves as the Chief Information Officer at the National Football League and is responsible for the league's technology strategy, shared service delivery and leadership of the league’s activities. She has been at the league since 2012. She is executive sponsor of the league’s WIN – Women's Interactive Network and was recently awarded a Game Changer Award by Sports Business Journal. In 2013, Forty Over Forty – Women to Watch named her as one of the top 40 women in business.

Sarah Greasley is Chief Technology Officer for Direct Line Group, and leads the teams responsible for technology strategy, architecture and innovation across the group. She is a highly experienced technical executive and strategic leader, as well as having many years of experience of designing large complex architecture. She has driven the delivery of the architecture to support DLG’s next generation platforms. She was previously at Distinguished Engineer at IBM, and is a strong advocate of Women in Technology across the industry.  

Dr Cathy Mulligan is VP & Regional CTO at Fujitsu North and West Europe, where she is responsible for setting the overall technical strategy across a broad range of technologies including e.g. 5G, IoT, Blockchain and AI.  She is also an Honorary Senior Researcher at UCL and a Visiting Researcher at Imperial College London, where she continues to research the future of data and digital transformation in a variety of industries.  Cathy has published multiple books on digital technologies and the economics that drives industries - the latest is 5G Networks.  She has a long-term interest in the role of technology in sustainable development and the SDGs

Nadine Thomson is the Global Chief Technology Officer for MediaCom, an international media agency part of the WPP Group that uses data, technology and creativity to design communications strategies that build brands. Over her career Nadine has led international, technology transformation programmes across media, retail, travel, entertainment and professional services. She has previously worked as Group Technology Director for Conde Nast International (Vogue, GQ), Technology Director for Vue Cinema and consultant for News UK on their digital technology. Alongside her technology career, Nadine is on the Board of VisitEngland the national tourism agency raising Britain’s profile worldwide and developing England and Britain’s visitor economy.

Carol Carpenter joined VMware in June 2020 as chief marketing officer. As CMO, Carpenter is responsible for leading all aspects of the Global Marketing organization, which includes Corporate Marketing, Partner, Segment and Field Marketing.

Carpenter brings to the role more than 25 years of technology sector experience. Most recently, she was vice president, Product Marketing at Google Cloud. Over the past three and a half years, Carpenter and the team led the transformation of Google Cloud from its early stage to its leadership position in cloud – building the team, crafting the brand positioning and campaign playbooks, enabling sales and the shift from products to solutions in its go-to-market. Prior to Google Cloud, Carpenter was the CEO of ElasticBox (acquired by CenturyLink) and held leadership and marketing roles at technology at Trend Micro, Keynote Systems and Apple and more.

Carpenter holds a bachelor of arts in economics degree from Stanford University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

An experienced executive with a proven track record of 25+ years in financial services, technology and operations, solutions engineering, strategy and governance, building organisational consensus, go-to-market, partnering, innovation, customer-centric transformations and customer success. Prior to joining Salesforce, Natasha held business and technology leadership roles such as Global Head of Technology in Standard Chartered Bank, Global Head of IT Strategy and Global Head of IT, Information Security & Product Development Risk in Deutsche Bank. Natasha has 14+ years of consulting and outsourcing experience with Accenture and EDS/Hewlett Packard.

Rebecca is currently Chief Information & Change Officer at Lloyd’s of London having previously developed her career across senior technology roles in the consulting, insurance and real estate industries, both in the UK and the US. She enjoys leading transformation and change programmes.   

She is energised by challenge and aspires to continue solving difficult problems as her career evolves. With a strong focus on delivering results, she holds high standards, both for herself and others. Her style is “collaborative yet decisive” and tends to balance analysis with action when considering her approach. She is sensitive to others’ needs and the culture she creates is likely to be marked by respect, consideration and mutual support. Colleagues should find her to be approachable and outgoing, and encouraging of teamwork and cooperation - she should engender their trust. She is resilient and upbeat and will take most things in her stride.  

Rebecca is an experienced strategic leader having developed the Hiscox NA and EMEA strategies as well as building the technology, data and cyber security strategies and functions for Aldermore. Cyber, technology risk management and resilience were a key hallmark of her tenure at Aldermore. 

Here are her career highlights: 

• 2017 – 2020: CIO, Aldermore Bank 
• 2015 – 2017: COO, Sheraton Systems 
• 2009 – 2015: Hiscox 
• 2013 – 2015: Head of IT, Europe, Guernsey & Management Operations 
• 2009 -2013: Head of IT, USA  
• 2007 – 2009: Spicerhart Group Ltd, IT Programme Manager. 

As Senior Vice President Research & Development, Julie Setser co-leads P&G Ventures, an arm of Procter & Gamble dedicated to partnering with startups, entrepreneurs, and inventors to build brands and businesses within the consumer packaged goods space. Julie brings many years of research and development across P&G experience to her current role. Julie holds a degree from University of California Berkeley.

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.

Mimi Omokri has a long and varied career, serving as an executive for numerous high-profile companies and currently, Uber’s Head of Business Development for Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the fast-growing regions for the company.

Prior to Uber, Mimi led commercial payments and built the Sub-Saharan Africa enterprise business at Mastercard from the ground-up at a time when startups were chipping away at incumbents and new technology was creating opportunities for all players. Name an innovation that’s changed commercial payments—mobile, e-commerce, AI, virtual—and Mimi has been there in the trenches.

She also understands the importance of bringing leading brands together through partnerships. Mimi has forged relationships between Amadeus and many notable companies — Citibank, Harrods, British Airways, Visa, Ethiopian Airlines, MTN Group and others — to give people in Europe, Middle East and Africa easier access to their bank accounts and the ability to send payments on the platform.

Prior to Mastercard, Mimi spent over 8 years working at top firms such as Jumia Group, Iroko Partners and American Express in Europe, holding P&L and leadership roles in strategy, sales, marketing, partnerships and product development.

Divya Smith is Director of Software Engineering at Hilton Worldwide Holdings. She has a bachelor’s in Computer Science and Mathematics and holds a MBA.

She started her technology career as a freshman intern at Target Corporation and now has 17+ years of technology experience in Development, Engineering, AI, DevOps, Operations and Support. Her first full-time job was a website developer at a Minneapolis based company, Securian. Later, she joined Target through the Technology Leadership Program and led many initiatives including re-writes of major systems that were supporting stores and digital channels. Her final role at Target included leading the Digital Reliability team for Target.com and building a machine learning tool that helped detect anomalies within the company's digital ecosystem. In 2018, she led the development of US Bank’s newest mobile app. Recently, her family decided to move to Texas where she received the opportunity to be part of Hilton’s Digital transformation in the Dallas area.

At Hilton, Divya currently is leading the Digital Reliability Engineering team that manages the DevOps pipeline, releases for Hilton.com, performance engineering and the content data network (CDN), Akamai. In her prior role at Hilton while leading multiple agile product teams, she rolled out features and properties that accounted for 99% of Hilton.com traffic through desktop and mobile.

Outside of work, she loves to spend time with her family that includes her husband and two kids and loves to go hiking!

Kayla is a tech and gaming nerd with a passion for building great products. She has over ten years of experience in the product space, building a variety of web and mobile applications at both the enterprise and startup levels. As part of the Data+Analytics team at Sony Music, her focus is on creating tools to help drive the decision-making process and root it in data. Working in a team that operates as a startup within a larger enterprise has become her specialty through the years, and she enjoys challenging the traditional way things are done to help push an organization into the digital, data-fueled, modern age.

Storm Fagan is an experienced Product leader and Executive with a background in growth, innovation at scale and building diverse, inclusive teams. Storm is Chief Product Officer at Just Eat.

Nirmal Srinivasan is Director of Engineering at PayPal. She is passionate about building high-performance engineering teams bringing great products to the customers she serves. After several years of working on end user facing product engineering teams, she is currently working for the platforms team supporting the PayPal developers.   She is cochair of the Women Who Build group at PayPal.  

Prior to PayPal She spent close to two decades at Netflix and Apple. In her roles as an engineer and engineering leader at Netflix she had led and been part of various teams including Customer Engineering, Marketing, e-commerce platform, and Billing & Payments.  At Apple she built and led a team creating a user generated content platform for Apple Care and Apple Developers websites. 

Nadia has over 9 years of experience in people and team management. She is passionate about technology, fostering a culture of excellence and building products that customers love. Currently as a Director of Engineering at HubSpot, Nadia runs the Marketing Campaigns Group where she leads the engineering teams building world-class marketing products for businesses.

Nadia started her career working in the videogames industry, building highly scalable and reliable online services for the Call of Duty franchise for over a decade where she eventually was running the Online Products Group.

Eugenia Planas is the Head of Digital Services for the Bank of England, responsible for all end user technology, front line functions and day-to-day operation of its datacentres. For the 650 colleagues working in Technology Directorate Eugenia acts as a sponsor and advocate for gender diversity, and is also at the forefront of the Bank’s efforts to embrace flexible working and supporting technologies. Her previous roles at the Bank of England included leading end user computing and service management for the Prudential Regulation Authority. Prior to joining the organisation Eugenia had extensive service management experience through roles in outsourcing companies such as Capgemini and Computacenter. She worked with customers in the Financial Services area, Public Sector and Advisory, focusing on strategic alignment of account services against contractual commitments.

With more than 20 years of industry experience, Marilyn McDonald is a product management maven. Her experience runs the gamut, from building simple and elegant customer experiences to defining scalable and decoupled platform products. She has been a leading voice and change agent in the evolution of a number of Fortune 500 companies. Her expertise is in increasing business agility, understanding and solving pain points in iterative cycles. At Mastercard, she heads the Product Management and Design/UX teams for the Digital, Marketing Business Services and Loyalty teams.

Prior to Mastercard, Marilyn worked at Amazon, Expedia and Citi. Most recently, she served as the senior director of product design and technical program management at StubHub. She was instrumental in rebuilding StubHub’s program management teams and Establishing Lean UX, Design Thinking and experimentation practices as the "ways of working" in Product and Design moving the company from a build and validate culture to rapid prototyping and experimentation. Marilyn holds a B.A. from Northern Arizona University and is a certified Scrum Product Owner.

Marilyn is an advocate of diversity and inclusion in technology. She has founded numerous corporate women’s programs including Women@Amazon and Circles programs at both Amazon and Citi. Marilyn is also a veteran participant of the Grace Hopper Celebration, a conference geared towards women in tech.

Divya Jain is an industry-recognized product and technology leader in machine learning and AI, with 15+ years of experience at various startups and Fortune 500 companies. She is currently the director of machine learning and platform engineering at Adobe — focused on Adobe Sensei, the company’s AI and machine learning technology. Previously, Divya was a research director at Tyco Innovation Garage where she led various deep learning initiatives in the video surveillance space. She also co-founded a
startup, dLoop Inc., which was acquired by Box in 2013. At Box, Divya led the team that built the first machine learning capabilities into the Box platform. Business Insider previously recognized her as one of the “22 Most Powerful Women Engineers In The World.” Divya is very passionate about open sharing of knowledge and information, and she is always working towards bridging technology gaps to further product innovation.

Ana Bakalinova is Head of Product at HuffPost, managing the digital product development of the international HuffPost editions. Ana’s experience as a strategic product leader spans over two decades, building large scale products for global corporations, news and broadcasters including BBC Global News, AOL, and Mirror, as well as setting up award winning e-commerce start-ups. 

Selected as one of the Women With Product Impact in Europe 2019, Ana’s product portfolio extends from AOL’s subscription services and BBCs first progressive web app to content management solutions for global editorial teams.

Maya is a Management Consultant at Capgemini Invent. Having worked across several industries and global locations, Maya specialises in digital transformation delivery and change management. She has a strong background in designing, managing and implementing complex technology programs.

Maya is also the Communications and Engagement lead within the Capgemini Race & Equality Network, where she works to create a sense of community, facilitating open and educational dialogue amongst colleagues to encourage a more inclusive workplace. Additionally, she works with organisations such as The Bright Network and volunteers within schools to inspire the next generation to succeed as the workplace of tomorrow.

Prior to a career in consultancy, Maya conducted financial analysis working for the world's largest broadly-based healthcare company, Johnson & Johnson as part of their Leadership Development Program.

Outside of work, Maya is an advocate for financial education. She founded a financial education platform aiming to break down the complexities of personal finance and advance financial literacy amongst Millennial women.

With 20 years experience in data protection, security and technology compliance challenges. Debbie, the current Global Group Data Protection Officer for Rentokil-Initial,  is responsible for implementing a data protection compliance program in over 84 countries. She provides pragmatic guidance to help ensure businesses get the compliance balance right.  She started her career as a barrister but moved into consultancy, commercial and compliance roles supporting a range of organisations including the police, MOD, Virgin Media, Siemens and Fujitsu. She tries to pack as much into a day as possible - enjoys spending time with her family and plays ice hockey in a premier league team!

Elena Bianchini has been Director of Customer Product at lasminute.com since July 2017. In May 2019, she also assumes responsibility for the Checkout & Ancillaries Products area. Graduated in Management Engineering, before joining lastminute.com, she gained significant experience with roles of increasing importance in the Telecommunications and High-Tech sectors. In Vodafone, she held the position of Head of Consumer Product, while for Vodafone Group, he participated in inter-operator innovation projects. After a brief experience with Oracle Italy, she was Head of Data Platforms in Banca IMI and participating in IWBank's "technological foundation." More at https://elenabianchini.info

At Google for more than seven years, Natalie embodies a rare combination of technical solution engineering- and customer-centric-based approach, delivering business and cloud technology strategies. Now based in London, Natalie has led large scale Enterprise Transformations across a range of industries including Banking, Media and Government and enjoys demonstrating the art of the possible using Google Technology through Machine learning, Data Analytics, Collaboration Tools, Google Culture and Innovation Methodologies. She even helped train the Google Voice, Ok Google! Natalie is Passionate about supporting women in Technology as an ambassador for the Women Tech Makers Program and was recently named one of Australia's Leading Women in Engineering.

Dr. Subha Madhavan is the first Chief Data Scientist and Founding Director of the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics (ICBI) at the Georgetown University Medical Center overseeing all research-related data and informatics initiatives. She launched a new and growing graduate program in Health Informatics and Data Science at Georgetown University in Fall, 2019 which attracts diverse students from around the world. She is Associate Dean of Health data science,
Biomedical Informatics and Oncology with research interests in data curation, integration and analytics across multi-modal and multi-scale health as well as life sciences datasets. In this role, she recruits and mentors high school students to Assistant professors in data science
and informatics. As a world-class leader in health data science, clinical informatics and health IT, she is responsible for several biomedical informatics efforts including the Georgetown Database of Cancer (G-DOC) platform for personalized medicine research. Working across multiple health systems in the Washington DC metropolitan area, she and her team have enabled access to over 4 million patient records to create a living laboratory for clinical translational research and education
in the Greater Washington geographic area. Her work won the Service to America award in 2005 for developing novel clinical genomics databases across cancer centers in the US.

Elizabeth Baron is an Enterprise Solutions Executive at Unity Technologies, where she creates solutions for the industrial design, engineering and manufacturing space, based on the innovative Unity platform that powers creation at all points in the product development process. She applies holistic and creative solutions for enterprise to connect knowledge with experience for cross-functional teams. 

Formerly, Elizabeth was a Technical Specialist in Immersive Realities at Ford Motor Company. She is the principal inventor of the Ford immersive Vehicle Environment (FiVE) process and technology, an immersive environment with high realism in experience, providing contextual data and real time global immersion for multiple disciplines across Ford. She then expanded FiVE to combine the physical and virtual worlds, creating location-based actionable immersive storytelling in Design Studios.

Nidhi leads the UX practice at Bilfinger Digital Next in Heidelberg, Germany. She has over 11 years of experience in the UX design space, building a variety of web and mobile applications and services.

As the UX lead at Bilfinger Digital Next, her current focus is to design digital services in traditional process-driven industries. Prior to this, Nidhi worked as a UX Manager at Accenture Interactive across India and UK in domains like Finance, Banking, Entertainment and Telecom across the full spectrum of User Centered Design process.

Nidhi is passionate about diversity and inclusion in technology. She is also an active member and ally of local LGBTQ communities and is constantly looking to support related initiatives.

Fatima has over 20 years’ experience in Telecommunications sector. Highly skilled senior manager with demonstrated leadership beyond her technology strength. Fatima brings a great blend of creativity & knowledge to solve complex problems. She led major BT transformation programmes Including Digital voice: A significant change for the industry & UK consumers which represents a move from an analogue to a digital, fibre led future.

Currently, she is leading the Ventures Businesses as CTIO B2B for BT, assisting the business with building new models and re-shaping business processes. Using Technology strategy, Innovation and Tech transformation across sectors; including healthcare, Media & TV, SME & Public Sector.

Fatima is passionate about the future of Technology and how it will shape our society. She believes that the fourth revolution is an opportunity to reset gender equality, social mobility and race. She believes that we at the Tech industry have the responsibility to shape the ethical development and deployment of AI technologies. AI is set to be deeply embedded into the fabric of society touching every aspect of people’s lives so we will have to ensure that the new Tech delivers benefits to industry and society as whole.

Fatima is an active promoter of diversity & inclusion, she has created a coaching and inspirational program for women managers in BT, extending the invitation to women managers in other industry sector, Finance, Insurance and Tech. this proved very successful, huge learning and insight exchange between candidates. The programme received support and funding from senior Executive to produce videos which were used as training material across the company.

Pauliina Jamsa is an engaging motivational speaker, life coach, stand-up comedian and responsible at Siemens for global enablement across 90 countries providing digital advice, leading agile projects and encouraging a fail-safe culture. She has lived in 5 countries, speaks 7 languages and has worked in agencies, start-ups and blue chips like SAP and Microsoft.

Having developed a method to overcome her social anxiety and fear of public speaking, her story from a bullied small-town girl to a global manager has been inspiring people around the world. She’s a keynote speaker, panellist and chairwoman in conferences in over 14 different countries from New York to London.

In B2B Marketing Magazine’s Top 10 list of women making the biggest impact in tech in 2019. Author of a free e-book: From anxious to unstoppable: how to be more confident at work.

Born in Pune, India, Pooja came to Germany for her Master studies in 2015. Immediately after her studies, she joined the Virtual Engineering Lab, Volkswagen AG as a Software Developer. She believes in technical creativity along with perseverance to push projects that could potentially have a huge impact in the future. Her domain of work focuses on working with the latest technologies like Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence solutions for the technical development and other departments in the automotive industry.

In addition, Pooja is also a strong believer in trying to drive sustainable solutions and work towards technologically environmental friendly projects and solutions mainly in the mobility domain. In her free time, she indulges herself in Indian classical dance and travelling.

Michelle is currently a Financial Systems Analyst at Lyft, where she is responsible for maintaining and developing Tableau dashboards for the Financial Planning & Analysis team. Prior to joining Lyft in May 2020, Michelle was a Senior Financial Crime Analytics Consultant at Crowe LLP where she assisted with data governance, model validations, and system implementations. In addition to her role at Lyft, Michelle has built dashboards on Tableau Public, claiming a Tableau Viz of the Day. She also placed in the Top 5 of the Women in Analytics Data Visualization competition in 2018 and 2019 with her Tableau dashboards. Michelle graduated from The University of Texas at Dallas with a BS in Management Information Systems and a MS in Business Analytics.

Dilruba is a Software QA Manager, at Palo Alto Networks. She is an accomplished, highly organized Engineering Manager with over 15 years’ experience in hands-on end-to-end software testing, leading, and managing engineering teams. She has worked for world-class software companies including Microsoft, Cisco, Hitachi Vantara, and Palo Alto Networks. Her strong interpersonal skills enable her to influence others by establishing rapport and communicating clearly and concisely with engineers, top management as well as internal and external stakeholders.

She has graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with an Electrical Engineering degree. She also completed her Masters from Santa Clara University with Engineering Management and Leadership.

Richa Sood is a veteran product leader currently working as an Integrity Product Manager @ Instagram where she ensures that users, influencers and businesses are safe from bad actors and previously @ Shutterfly where she was the Director of Platform & Growth leading consumer facing products across native app, mobile web and desktop. Richa is a former strategy consultant who spent 5+ years at McKinsey & Co. and Monitor Deloitte. Richa graduated with an MBA from Cornell, serves on the Cornell Johnson Recent Alumni Council, has spoken at multiple product events and teaches Product Management at Product School.

Hitomi is a Product Manager at Sony managing news media solutions. She focuses on digitalisation and agile transformation of traditional businesses, especially in the media sector.

Her journey began as a journalist reporting for TV broadcasters in Japan, eventually becoming a Head of News focusing on audience engagement strategies on multiple distribution channels. After a Cambridge MBA, she transformed her career to the tech side of the media industry and joined a scaled startup in the media space.

Growing up in a traditional society, she was always a weird one with career aspirations "like men's". She is an advocate for encouraging young women to pursue their career aspirations. 

Born in a lower middle. class family in India, it was a struggle for her parents to provide education. But the value of education they instilled in her, helped her grow. She did her Masters in Computer Science @ Texas A&M University
and now she is Director of Quality Assurance Engineering team @ HPE. Praveena carries rich experience in Leadership, Storage, Networking, Quality Assurance and Automation. Prior to HPE, she worked at Cisco for 6 years
and Ixia for 6 years. She loves spending time with her kids and have been lucky to do so with the right work-life balance while working @HPE team for 7 years. She believes in “Customers come first, if you have that mantra, you’ll be successful”. She is big proponent of girls/women in tech and inculcates the same into our younger generation. She is founder/chair-person of Storage Women’s ERG group at HPE. She was nominated for HPE Women’s Excellence Award, 2020. She also was interviewed by Media7 for
International Women’s Day 2020. She was also Speaker at vGHC2020 event.

Software Developer and YouTuber with a passion for teaching Code through Retro Game Walkthroughs. 

Simone Gernon has 20 years' experience working in a male dominated industry and is the 3rd Generation in her family to work in the betting industry even though she was told as a child that it is no place for a girl.

Since joining Paddy Power 2001 as a relief cashier supporting evening Horse Racing , Simone Gernon has worked in both the retail and online estate in multiple roles all while raising her now grown-up sons.

Simone Gernon is currently a Product Owner with Paddy Power Betfair and works closely with development teams to create bespoke platforms for the Sports Trader's needs
She shares her story of how working evenings and weekends on a live trading floor has led to a career in Technology, where she has been part of the transformation of the company from a betting shop chain to major global technology company on the FTSE25

Nahia Orduna is Senior Manager in Analytics and Digital Integration in Vodafone Business. She has a master in Telecommunications Engineering and holds a MBA.

She has over 15 years’ experience in companies as Cisco Systems or Vodafone.

She is part of the EMEA core team of Women in Big Data, an industry-driven global organisation that encourages diversity in data careers. Her view on topics around cognitive diversity or digital transformation has been share in various articles in the World Economic Forum Agenda and she has won the Data Leader of the Year Award 2019 at Women in IT Europe Summit.

Elvira Sarieva is a Programme Manager for Digital Marketing Transformation at Google, where she helps organisations across Europe, Middle East and Africa improve their digital marketing and organisational capabilities. Elvira’s passion for Digital Marketing Transformation comes from personally seeing how the combination of people, technology and willingness to change can lead to significant improvements in customer experience.

Prior to Google, Elvira has led marketing strategies for companies like Diageo, L’Oreal and Johnson & Johnson, overlooking brand development in biggest international markets.

Being a strong advocate for Women in leadership, Elvira actively works on Women@ Google group that promotes culture of inclusion, women’s career development and social impact.

Valentina is a UX/UI Designer at the Milan FLEX Design center. Her main role is to design smooth, user-friendly product experiences to improve people’s lives. In charge of embedded User Interfaces, APPs design and development, her key to delivering high-quality products is finding the best compromise among technical skills and trust relationships among cross-functional teams.

She made a hard decision when after 10 years as a PRO volleyball player, she decided to invest time over her long-term dream to become a designer, willing to restart everything from scratch.

Born in Tuscany and raised around Italy, Valentina holds a Master’s degree in Product and Interaction Design from the University of Florence.  When she isn’t busy with digital projects, she loves cooking for her beloveds and joining beach volleyball activities.

Fiona is the CEO of Women on Boards UK and advisor to Peel Hunt, an award-winning UK mid-cap stockbroker. She is an expert in the areas of Governance, Regulation and Talent Management who has sat on marketing, nominations and audit & finance committees. Currently, Fiona is Chair of Hanx's nominations committee a sexual wellness fast moving consumer goods company.

She is a passionate angel investor who helped to found one of the first female angel investment clubs and one of the judges for The Sunday Times annual NED Awards.

Formerly Fiona was a director for Old Mutual Asset Management and Hill Samuel Asset Management, running the Global Equities and Emerging Markets Desks respectively. She has advised the board of the Thai Euro Fund and been the Director responsible for Pension Fund asset allocation for OMAM's Employee Pension Fund.

In 2012, Fiona launched Women on Boards to support women, and men, make the right connections and career choices to get to board level within their own company or to take on a non-executive board role. Since launch, WOB has supported over 1800 individuals get onto boards. Fiona and the WOB team work tirelessly to lobby influential directors to push for increased board vacancy transparency.

As the CISO of Precisely, a global data integrity company, Sue brings her leadership and broad technology experience to help companies concentrate on growth by promoting innovation and productivity enhancements through the creation of secure cloud applications, infrastructure operations, data analytics, business process optimization and talent management. Over her career, she has completed many mergers and acquisitions, including Dell-EMC, CVS Pharmacy-Albertsons, Staples-Corporate Express and at Episerver-Optivo, Idio and Insite.

She’s held strategic positions at Microsoft and as the CIO & CISO of Episerver, Net Atlantic, BTE Consulting and for two of Aramark’s apparel companies, Galls and Wearguard-Crest. She has also held high level positions at the Staples Corporation and at CVS/pharmacy. While having worked at large companies, Sue brings big company experiences to the SMB market, without the bureaucracy.

Sue is certified cloud architect and has several degrees, including an Executive Leadership MBA from Boston University and a Master’s in Security from UMASS. She is a Board member for SIM (Society for Information Management) and is the Program Director for Brandeis Universities Master’s in Security program. She also is a technical and business advisor to several startup companies across the world.

Lisa Schneider is Chief Digital Officer at Merriam-Webster, where she leads digital strategy and execution across product development, content strategy, user experience, and technology. She has redefined the dictionary for the digital age, changing people’s perception of the brand from a “dusty book on the shelf” to a timely, relevant resource and commentary users turn to every day. Under Lisa’s leadership, Merriam-Webster has won numerous awards including several Webby and Shorty awards. She is a Webby Awards Executive Judge, and was recently featured on the AdAge Creativity 50, Folio: Top Women in Media, and Business Transformation 150 lists.

Previously, Lisa held executive roles in digital strategy and product development at Penton, Budget Travel, Reader’s Digest, and Bridal Guide.

Christine Heckart, Chief Executive Officer of Scalyr, is a veteran of the technology industry having worked for iconic companies including Microsoft, Juniper Networks, Cisco and NetApp. She has led business strategy for multibillion dollar businesses in critical roles including COO, GM, president, and CMO, and has experience across software, SaaS, hardware, and service business models. She has sat on the boards of Lam Research & 6sense and is currently a board member at Contentful. Christine was named one of the Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology by the National Diversity Council and a 2016 Woman of Influence by Silicon Valley Business Journal. Christine graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in Economics from the University of Colorado, Bould

Amanda Ostrowitz is Senior Vice President of Commercial at Fyllo, a suite of enterprise-grade software and services built for the complexities of highly regulated industries. In her role, Ostrowitz helps drive global growth strategies for the company’s growing customer base, and has a deep understanding of the ever-changing regulatory environment surrounding cannabis laws. Ostrowitz is an attorney by trade, and an entrepreneur who developed CannaRegs, the industry’s most comprehensive database of federal, state, and local cannabis regulations. 

Elizabeth is the EDI Lead and Director at Inclusive Boards, an agency that specialises in equality, diversity and inclusion. 

Elizabeth and her team support organisations and sectors in their efforts to develop more diverse boards, senior leadership teams and stronger governance structures. Elizabeth has delivered D&I training to boards and leadership teams, including Hello Fresh. She has developed and supported the development of a diversity action plan for over 140 Sport England and UK Sport funded organisations at board level, conducted research into diversity for the UK Social Investment sector, STEM and charity sector and has sat on EDI panels for CBI and the Institute of Directors. 

She ensures that organisations are diversifying their boards and leadership teams in an authentic and equitable way, this has led to some boards recruiting more people of colour and disabled candidates. Prior to joining Inclusive Boards, Elizabeth supported women and people of colour to access start-up capital for their business through an accelerator programme as part of a Business Innovation and Skills and Department of Work and Pensions contract.   

Caroline Winnett is the Executive Director of Berkeley SkyDeck accelerator - a global hub for entrepreneurs that now hosts more than 280 companies per year. Collectively, the more than 340 Berkeley SkyDeck alumni startups that have passed through the program have raised $1.2 billion in venture capital. In addition to U.S.-based startups, SkyDeck has attracted startups to its accelerator from many foreign countries since Winnett took leadership in 2014, with 60 percent of recent cohort startups coming from outside the U.S., and all of them bringing 700 investors from the region and the world to hear startup pitches on SkyDeck’s bi-annual demo day. In 2018 Winnett also launched the Berkeley SkyDeck Fund, a VC oversubscribed $24M fund investing in Berkeley SkyDeck startups that donates 50 percent of carried interest back to UC Berkeley. In addition to her executive role, Winnett is an angel investor, advisor, a startup board member, and a speaker.

Ying Zheng, the Co-founder and President at AiFi is an entrepreneur, an internationally-acclaimed researcher, and a top computer scientist changing the future of shopping to make it automated, privacy-conscious, and inclusive. Her business goes broader than Amazon GO, with customers across five continents. With AiFi, Zheng is building an autonomous store platform to automate stores of all sizes and formats to make stores contactless and safer for employees and shoppers alike. Zheng’s use of edge computing keeps people’s personal info private, even to GDPR and CCPA standards, while her diversity-generating simulated environments greatly speed up the AI training process. 

A Change Manager and Business Coach, ‘moving people’ is at the heart of what Angela does. She has worked as change manager for large scale HRIT projects and is now more interested in assignments involving culture change and implementing new ways of working. In her coaching practice she focuses on key individuals that want to advance fast and powerfully in their career. When not in corporate Angela loves hosting underground music events. 

Motto: Work smarter, love harder

https://www.linkedin.com/in/angela-huser/ 

For Daphne Pertsekos, it has always been about the learning process. What are the mechanisms involved, what can we learn from nature to create intelligent machines? Those questions led her to her position as data scientist at National Gendarmerie, one of two national police forces of France. Some of the missions of this military institution are general public order duties, criminal investigations, crowd and riot control. Deeply convinced that efforts in the field of Artificial Intelligence should be directed towards public interest, she assists the Gendarmerie in setting up A.I projects such as chatbots assisting citizens to file online complaints.

Working in various industries, in 3 different countries, with experiences ranging from kindergarten teacher to machine learning specialist, she can shed new lights to the challenges of the fourth revolution.

Her motto: Mistakes are often the greatest teachers.

Ibukun Akinnawo is a Fintech professional and an authority on striking strategic partnerships and operational efficiency. She currently serves as Launch Lead for West Africa at pawaPay where she spearheads  the company’s launch efforts in Africa.

With her strong background as a certified project manager and a knack for strategic business operations, Akinnawo has successfully initiated and closed a Mastercard issuing partnership for Nigeria’s first full-service digital bank, Kuda Bank, in her role as Business Operations Manager. She further extended her impressive business acumen to Paystack, where she established processes that saved the company millions otherwise lost to fraud and false chargeback claims.

Akinnawo co-founded, scaled and successfully exited Independent PA. The company, which was accepted to the renowned She Leads Africa accelerator program, was a boutique virtual assistant agency that provided support to C- level executives at companies such as Andela and Flutterwave.

Leveraging the unique insights she has gained as a woman in tech, Akinnawo mentors with passion, guiding her audience to effectively strengthen and elevate their careers in tech to new heights.  

When she is not working, you will find this super-operator catching up on self-care and experimenting with ways to live more sustainably while encouraging others to do the same.

A dynamic & highly-driven digital disruptor with a keen interest in helping organisations implement a Devops working practice throughout. A technical leader with a keen understanding of how to drive value to the business. With 20+ years’ experience specializing in system integration and consolidation.

Global departmental leadership experience, engaging with business stakeholders, executives and 3rd parties to drive ambitious technology strategies and technology roadmaps, aligned to core business requirements and needs.

Able to drive business change management and business transformation agendas, including delivering digital service transition, provision of ‘best in class’ technical services, support, technology upgrades & systems migration, contributing to business value through the use of technology.

Twitter: RazzleDazzleC

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cherylrazzell/

These are some things I do;
* Technical business leadership; i.e. technology- and product -strategy, org planning, org growth, budgeting, tax credits, patent development and processes, etc.
* Technical engineering leadership; executing technology strategy, product delivery, technology prioritisation, development standards and processes, code, etc.
* Team leadership; mentoring, team career development plans and processes, culture growth, etc.
* Misc; public speaking and presentation, social media presence, commenting on the broader topic of software engineering, code and technology trends.

Twitter: @psjarlo

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jarlostensen/

Rita seeks to transform financial services by combining her extensive industry knowledge with her curiosity for new technologies and passion for new propositions driven by fintech and start-ups.

Rita currently drives FinTech parternships at HSBC. As a fintech enthusiast, she is always eager to connect with fintech and startups to drive change in financial services, whether via internal POCs or offline mentoring support.

Prior to this role, Rita worked at Ernst & Young and Accenture, driving large scale transformation projects.

Outside of work, Rita is a blogger and a regular speaker at Financial Industry events.

Melody is a Product Owner & Strategist at Elephant Ventures with over 15 years of experience in project management and product management combined across technology, digital health, banking, marketing and non-profit spaces.

Prior to her current role, Melody was VP of Product for include.io, an inclusive recruitment tool for diverse technical talent. Include.io was the first tool that allowed hiring managers to hire intentionally across all backgrounds, identities and educational spectrums.  Melody led the Design & Engineering team and was responsible for product strategy development, growth and evolution of the include.io platform.  Her focal areas are on user engagement, retention, user behavior, and experience, with the objective of product growth, market growth and maximizing overall product ROI.

Celina leads the team responsible for international online training initiatives at MED-EL, a global technology company that manufactures cochlear implants and hearing solutions that help children and adults with hearing loss.
Born in Canada and raised in the Philippines, Celina holds a Master’s degree in Audiology from the University of the Philippines and a Doctor of Audiology degree from the University of Florida. She worked as a Research Audiologist for the Philippine National Ear Institute and as a Clinical Associate for MED-EL in the Philippines before joining MED-EL Headquarters in Innsbruck, Austria.
When she isn’t busy developing e-learning solutions, she’s a wife and mother trying to strike a balance between career and motherhood.

Kate Little is Managing Director of Digital Six, one of Scotland’s most successful ecommerce agencies.  The company is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Digital Six works with clients to grow their ecommerce businesses through proactive strategies that will grow online revenue. Their 16 strong team including developers, design and marketing deliver high-performing websites and campaigns for some of Scotland’s best-known retailers. Kate also holds a position on the ministerial trade board for the Scottish Government advising how international trade can be increased through ecommerce.

Olive is a sales professional and personal development advocate. She currently works as an Inside sales account manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise operated by selectium where she is responsible for performing various full life-cycle inside sales activities, targeted at driving end-to-end HPE revenue and positioning of HPE products, profitability and pipeline within the SMB space in Nigeria.

Prior to her current role, she worked in consulting as an associate in strategy and project management, proferring and designing solutions for organizations on Corporate Social Responsibility and sustainability.

She co-runs Growth Plan, a social enterprise committed to training Nigerian students and graduates soft skills required for corporate careers through informative workshops, seminars, counselling and mentoring. 

Outside of work, you will find her reading fiction or listening to podcasts.

Kelly Hoey is obsessed with changing the way we understand and approach networking. She’s the author of Build Your Dream Network: Forging Powerful Connections In A Hyper-Connected World (Tarcher Perigee/Penguin Random House), a modern, practical guide to the necessary (and frequently dreaded) task of networking.  Kelly spreads her networking gospel in her keynote talks and on the Build Your Dream Network podcast. 

Kelly has worked with top companies, brands and conferences. She’s appeared on CNBC’s Power Pitch, co-created and moderated the “Meet The Innovators” speaker series at Apple, and contributed to publications such as The New York Times, Forbes.com, Fast Company, and Inc. Kelly’s insights have been featured in Real Simple, Working Mother, Good Morning America, AARP, Vogue.com, Brit & Co, The Muse, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, CBC Radio, Monster.com, The Ladders, Parade, Business Insider and many more, as an authority on networking.

A former attorney and active participant in New York’s startup community, Kelly has been lauded from Forbes (“1 of 5 Women Changing the World of VC/Entrepreneurship”) to Fast Company (“1 of the 25 Smartest Women On Twitter”) to Business Insider (“1 of the 100 Most Influential Tech Women On Twitter”) and Inc. (“1 of the 10 Most Well-Connected People in New York City's Startup Scene”). EBW 2020 included her on their list of the “100 Most Influential Global Leaders Empowering Women Worldwide”.

As President and Chief Executive Officer, Amy Scarlino is responsible for the strategic direction and management of Scarlino Speaker Strategies, LLC. Prior to forming the agency, Ms. Scarlino was President and CEO of The Catchpole Corporation. She held several positions within Catchpole during her more than 13 years with the company, including Chief Operating Officer, Director of Client Services, and Senior Account Executive. Ms. Scarlino has managed the corporate speaker programs and executive visibility initiatives for companies such as VMware, PBS, UPS, Trend Micro, Microsoft, BASF, and The Weather Channel.

Earlier in her career, Ms. Scarlino was a Market Manager for Group III Promotions and served as Project Manager within the brand consultancy, Ashton Brand Group. 

Ms. Scarlino holds a B.S. in Business Administration and a B.A. in Marketing from the University of North Carolina in Charlotte.  She has spoken at several industry conferences some of which include the PRSA International Conference, PRSA Northeast District Chapter Annual Conference, the NVCA National Summit, Spark Executive Forum, the Professional Speechwriters Association World Conference, the Executives’ Club of Chicago, and Women of the Channel Leadership Summit.  She serves as a judge for the Stevie Awards for Women in Business and was a founding member and event chair of the Women Advancing (formerly WIMMI) Boston chapter.

Marja founded Jump in 2016, based on the belief that every person is unique and job matches should be too. Jump is the world’s first conversational job platform and personalises the job hunt for professionals through AI and behavioural data. Working with some of the top law firms in the UK, Jump is rapidly expanding to make the technology available to all people in the UK and beyond.

With 15 years’ experience as an executive leadership coach to enterprise organisations, Anna is a well-respected specialist in leadership coaching, and a founder of a game-changing software company. OpenBlend makes it easy to improve performance in a hybrid workforce or remote team, by connecting business requirements, employee needs and effective managers. In just 6 years, OpenBlend has made a significant impact in some of the UK’s leading organisations at a truly remarkable rate. 

Elani leads on venture strategy at MDR LAB, a legal tech accelerator for early stage and growth startups within Mishcon de Reya. Elani is passionate about including underrepresented people in the London start-up environment, having held numerous operational roles in start-ups and scale-ups globally. She works actively on diversity and inclusion in her additional role as a Venture Capital Fellow with Included VC.

Since running the school shop at 14, Jo has been a serial entrepreneur. Her passion for great customer service led to Bubbl, a new award winning mobile customer engagement tool that is disrupting the world of mobile advertising and marketing. This groundbreaking technology supercharges existing mobile apps with geolocation and rich media location-based content.

Her business development and management credentials come from a long career as an innovation consultant to technology start ups, and as a PR and marketing expert across multiple brands. She is also passionate about leading with heart which reflects the company culture that emanates from Bubbl.

Is a Former GB boxer, a gold medallist and a mother of 3 fierce young females.

Lesley share her story of how she became a gold medalist in the first entry, the competitive environment in the world of boxing and the tools she learned in the ring to keep her performance up.

A corporate athlete who worked for 12 years in the corporate world, an ex-Googler who transformed herself into a Boxing coach. Els shares her story of how the competitive environment in the corporate world made an impact on her and what we can learn from this. Sharing her knowledge about her career change as a boxing coach and how these tools can be adapted in the workplace.

Alisha Arora is an ambitious 14 year old on a mission to leverage exponential technology to solve some of the world’s largest problems. She is an advocate and activator for mental health, and is currently researching at MIT’s AI lab to diagnose and prevent suicide with machine learning. As an ardent philanthropist she founded her own non-profit organization, The HopeSisters. Their passion for supporting children in foster care has led them to gain recognition on national television and from government officials.

Liz Myers is an executive leadership coach and consultant specializing in creating authentic, balanced leaders and cohesive, human-centric teams. She has been professionally facilitating virtual meetings for over ten years. She is now a bonafide meeting snob and has a hard time attending other people's meetings. Liz earned a Masters degree from Stanford University in engineering and earned her coaching certification through the International Coaching Federation. Learn more about Liz at https://www.integrative-leadership.com/ or www.linkedin.com/in/liz-myers.