Alina Aronova (Keynote Address)
Alina Aronova is SVP of Technology Operations for the Global Product Technology organization at Cengage. She is responsible for driving meaningful business transformation and operational maturity through the development and implementation of strategic and tactical initiatives across all functional areas of the technology group. She is also in charge of the management and execution of all activities for the Chief Technology Officer's Transformation Office and oversees the Program Management Organization and Agile teams. She is also a board member for SDI, digital supply chain company and the founder of Almax Executive Coaching and Leadership Advisory firm. With a strong track record in business transformation in diverse functional areas, industries, and organizations from start-ups to global enterprises, Alina is committed to tackling the challenges and complications that companies face in a multitude of stages. She has an ability to build actionable and executional workflows to deliver results. Prior to joining Cengage in 2014, Alina was VP of Process Management for Euro-Pro LLC where she drove new business development, built a center of excellence, and overhauled the talent strategy in the program management function. Prior to Euro-Pro, she spent three years at the John Hancock Life Insurance Company, where she was responsible for ensuring the completion of global regulatory and compliance initiatives, rolling out project management processes and infrastructure and directing global-scale IT projects. Alina has a reputation amongst her colleagues as a trusted advisor, natural relationship builder and persuasive change evangelist. She holds an MBA from Babson College and a Bachelor's degree from Northeastern University. She resides in Newton, MA with her husband and two sons. |
Hande Guven (Cybersecurity)
Hande Guven is a Senior Threat Intelligence Consultant at Recorded Future. Hande graduated from Tufts University in 2018 with a major in International Relations and a minor in Computer Science. Recorded Future is a privately held cybersecurity company offering industry-leading security intelligence to private and public sector clients. At Recorded Future, Hande acts as the Technical Team Lead for a group of consultants, delivering technical trainings and intelligence briefings to clients. Prior to her current role, she was an intern at cybersecurity company FireEye and Washington D.C. based think tank New America. |
Gabrielle Thomas (Expanding DEI Panel)
Gabrielle Thomas is a Customer Success Manager at Robin and a former DI&B Program Manager at HubSpot where she supported the Product and Engineering teams to create, plan, and execute on their DI&B programs, initiatives and, partnerships. Before working in the tech sector, Gabrielle worked in education through both non-profits and higher education where her passion for educational access was formed. |
Jennifer Damis (Expanding DEI Panel)
Jennifer Damis is Director of User Experience (UX) at Kessel Run, the operational name of Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Detachment 12. Kessel Run is an acquisitions and software development unit that uses DevSecOps to deliver war-winning software capabilities. In her current role, Jennifer leads a team of designers and software engineers who are responsible for providing a positive user experience for the warfighter. Prior to joining Kessel Run, Jennifer held several senior UX roles at organizations including Hearst Autos and TSYS. With over eighteen years in the tech sector ranging from startups, consultancies, government sector, and private sector, Jennifer has watched digital experiences evolve. Jennifer has a B.S. in Information Management and Technology from Syracuse University and a MPA from University of Delaware. Jennifer has a number of technology professional certificates including Certified Usability Analyst, Project Management, Information and Communication Technology Accessibility (ICT) and Marketing Research. |
Valarie Gilbert (Own Your Onboarding)
Valarie is the Founder and CEO of Valiant Coaching. Her coaching practice includes supporting chief counsels, university deans, as well as senior technology leaders in the hi-tech industry. Valarie seeks to empower her clients to be both resilient and confident, helping them to develop leadership and communication skills that build high performing diverse teams that are deliberately inclusive. Prior to starting Valiant Coaching, Valarie held VP positions at Marriott International, S&P Global, Slalom Build and leadership roles at Cisco Systems, Dell EMC and AT&T Bell Labs. She has managed projects ranging from the development of Marriott’s Bonvoy mobile application to Cisco Systems’ use of machine translation to deliver multilingual support sites. Valarie holds a Masters in Mechanical & Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and a Bachelors from Carnegie Mellon University. She serves on a number of advisory boards that focus on the empowerment of young women and people of color; Girl Scouts, Nerdy Girl Success and TY-Education. She is gleefully married for 35 years and the mother of two amazing women; an attorney and UX designer. |
Helen Lee Richter (Machine Learning in Banking)
Helen graduated from Tufts in 2018 from the School of Engineering with a degree in Computer Science and Math. Since graduating, she has been working at Capital One in the Center for Machine Learning building ML tools for data scientists, primarily focusing on providing scalable solutions. She is currently the technical lead building model explainability and health monitoring tools. Machine learning is a vital part of Capital One’s business and tech strategy. Capital One uses ML to provide better customer experiences by being able to provide customer service and fraud alerts in real time. Helen will dive into her personal experience in the ML space, providing insight into her daily roles and responsibilities, and explaining in more detail the projects she has worked on and the challenges she faced. |
Pam Nesbitt (Technology in Healthcare)
Pam Nesbitt is Global Healthcare Lead of Commercial Software Engineering at Microsoft, a team of about 800 software engineers who work with top-tier clients to solve their enterprise IT needs using Azure and the many solutions that Microsoft brings to bear. She works every day to try to increase operational efficiencies at healthcare facilities, to provide seamless virtual care, to help, through enterprise computing to provide a 360 degree view of the patient and their travels through the system to ensure they get the best care, and she works tirelessly on vaccination efficiency efforts. Previous to this she was employed at IBM for many years and in many positions, among them Facilitator to the C-Suite of the Technology Team for CEO, Sam Palmisano, enabling him to see disruptive technologies and their potential impact on IBM. When she left IBM she was an executive and Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect for Life Sciences, and Chief Architect of Sugar.IQ, a partnership with Medtronic and a product to help persons with Type 1 Diabetes to better manage their condition through near-realtime feedback on behaviors which affected their status and predictions on blood sugar lows 4 hours ahead. As a result of this she has deep experience in working with Medical Devices and the implications for software development and FDA regulations. She is a seasoned inventor, beginning in 2003, and creating the Women Inventors Community at IBM in 2006 which reached 1000 women across IBM and resulted in an enormous increase in invention from women across the globe. This community blossomed into the state it visualized at its instantiation: a group of strong women inventors who went on to create communities of their own across IBM and the world. She was a member of the Academy of Technology at IBM, and led three conferences over three years regarding the Impact of Technology on Humans. Ms. Nesbitt has filed over 250 patent applications with the USPTO, is a Master Inventor and was IP lead for her division over many years. She has received a number of internal and external awards for her work including an Outstanding Innovation Award as well as two Brandon Hall Awards and a Texas Interactive Media Award, has presented at dozens of international conferences, has published in a number of peer-reviewed journals and has authored Redbooks and DeveloperWorks articles. She holds a B.S. in Neurobiology from Cornell University and a M.S. in Computer Science from Cleveland State University. |
Hillary Taverna (Early Career Development with Cengage)
Hillary (she/her) is a Technical Product Manager at Cengage Group, where she has focused on building better student and instructor experiences for the US Higher Education, International Higher Education, and global English Language Teaching business units. Most recently, she and her colleagues spent a few months conducting and analyzing over 200 interviews with English language instructors from around the world, as part of a research initiative to identify underserved needs in the ELT market. She is also a Boston site lead for Cengage’s Women in Technology (WiT) employee resource group. |
Lauren Van Heerden (Tech for Non-CS Majors Panel)
Lauren has a Math degree from University of Vermont and has lived / worked in 18 countries throughout her career. She's had some amazing roles in my career ranging from consultant, product manager, patent inventor, chief innovation officer, strategist and technology leader. Her industry interests are tech, financial services, healthcare, startups. She works at Salesforce, a tech company helping our customers digitally transform and leads a team that specializes in the specific products to vertical industries. Since COVID began, her focus has been in helping our customers with testing, contact tracing and vaccination solutions world wide. Outside of work she spend time with my husband, she's into Peloton and exercise, hike and ski. During COVID, she challenged herself to start new hobbies and has started gardening and improved her cooking/cocktail skills. |
Catherine Buan (Tech for Non-CS Majors Panel)
Ms. Buan is best known in SIlicon Valley for her track record with high growth tech companies including the recent IPO’s of Asana, Lyft, Okta, AppDynamics, Docusign and many more. For over 20 years, Catherine has led award-winning Investor Relations programs.She is brought into companies for critical events including IPO’s, M&A, reputation management, turnarounds and maximizing equity valuation long term. Ms. Buan was also President of PhilDev, one of the largest private foundations in SE Asia for economic development in the Philippines. Today she remains on the Board of Directors. Ms. Buan has also been on the board of directors of the American Red Cross, the Asian Pacific Fund, and Beyond-the-Book. Ms. Buan Graduated from Stanford University with a BA in Economics. She has two daughters. One of them is currently a senior and economics major at Tufts. |
Karen Donoghue (UI/UX and PM Career Paths)
Karen Donoghue is a consulting Interaction Architect for corporate clients and an Advisor on product design for early-stage startups. Karen has designed MVPs releases of products that have produced significant impact, including the UX for Resilient Systems, a startup acquired by IBM Security. Her recent work for startups includes MVP design for Equip Health, an online platform for treating eating disorders. Karen also serves as an Advisor to aiberry (Seattle), Turivius (Sao Paolo), and SecurityScorecard (NYC). In addition, she was an advisor to the founders of MetaCarta (a startup acquired by Nokia). She recently served a one-year appointment as an advisor to the Tufts University Department of Computer Science. Karen is an inventor on over a dozen software patents related to software user experiences. In 2002, Karen authored the first book linking business strategy to online user experience, published by McGraw-Hill in New York. During the summer of 2021, Karen co-authored “Envision Product: User Experience for Founders”. She earned a BS in Computer Science from Tufts University and an MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. Karen also releases her own products and recently launched Local Haze, an iPhone app that uses crowdsourced air quality sensor data to allow consumers to monitor local air quality. Local Haze monitors over 27,000 air quality sensors worldwide. In her spare time, Karen volunteers as a mentor to students and aspiring designers |
Laura Holly (UI/UX and PM Career Paths)
Ms. Holly is currently the Global Head of the Olympus Medical Digital Products Business Unit. She leads global business teams dedicated to delivering value-add services and connected devices, procedural workflow, telecollaboration, and Computer-Assisted Diagnosis (CAD) A.I. solutions. Olympus is a leading manufacturer of medical devices and software solutions for gastroenterology, urology, pulmonology, ENT, as well as general, thoracic, and neuro-surgery specialties for hospitals across the world. Laura joined Olympus in the 2017 acquisition of Image Stream Medical, Inc., where she served as the Head of Marketing and Product Management. Prior to ISM, Laura led the Lantern Hill Group, a product strategy consulting firm. Her hands-on practice helped healthcare and technology companies develop product management expertise, create global market entry plans, and realize innovative products. Laura has over 20 years of experience as a product and marketing leader, managing dozens of commercial products for software, technology, healthcare startups, and multinational companies. Her real passion is collaborating with customers, design, and R&D to bring category-defining V1 products to life. Laura earned her A.B. in Psychology/Computer Science from Smith College and an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Business. Outside of work, Laura mentors new product managers through the Boston Product Management Association and trains German Shepherd Dogs for obedience, agility, and other dog sports. |
Hannah Zafar (Engineering Panel)
Hannah graduated in 2019 from Tufts University with a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Engineering and a minor in Environmental Policy. She is currently an Engineer at Environmental Partners, where she designs and manages projects for drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater infrastructure. Hannah is an active member of the New England Water Environment Association (NEWEA). In her free time, Hannah enjoys hiking, scuba diving, and traveling to new places. Lily Buechler (Engineering Panel)
Lily Buechler is a PhD Candidate in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. She also currently works with the Grid Integration, Systems & Mobility (GISMo) group at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Her research focuses on using optimization, control, and machine learning to better integrate distributed energy resources into the power grid. She received her MS from Stanford in 2019 and BS from Tufts in 2017, both in Mechanical Engineering. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, mountain climbing, skiing, and drawing. |
Alice Lee (Engineering Panel)
Alice is a double Jumbo with a BS degree in Computer Engineering (2015) and MS degree in Electrical Engineering (2019). She switched her major a few times and ended up going with computer engineering because it was a mix of computer science and electrical engineering. Her interests are at the intersections of computer architecture, hardware, and security. Alice worked at Intel as an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designer. She is currently a researcher in the cyber division at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, with focus on secure and resilient embedded systems. Outside of work, Alice enjoys throwing and making functional pottery. |
Emma Cusack (Engineering Panel)
Emma graduated from Tufts University in 2019 with a BSME and then started in the Edison Engineering Development Program at GE Healthcare in Milwaukee, WI. She completed 3 rotations in various areas of the business, all focused on mechanical engineering. She graduated from the program in July and currently works as a mechanical component engineer for the X-ray tube business, where she is supporting the design of a new X-ray tube. Her interests are in thermal testing & modeling, finite element analysis, and reliability. She loves working for the healthcare sector! She's also pursuing her MSME part time from Johns Hopkins University and is planning to graduate in the spring. During the summer she helps run the GE Healthcare's engineering internship program and also recruit for GE through SWE. In her free time she enjoys hiking, crossword puzzles, and going to the beach. |
Jamie Brandon (Working at a Startup Panel)
Jamie is an NLP data scientist at Workhuman. She came from undergraduate degrees in math and physics from Adrian College, then applied those skills to the area of Linguistics. She earned her Master’s in Computational Linguistics from Brandeis University, then began work at CallMiner on NLP tasks like training word embeddings and clustering. Jamie joined the Editorial Board for Springer’s Journal, AI & Ethics, acting as an author and reviewer. She now works at Workhuman, building NLP model to predict implicit bias. Outside of work, Jamie enjoys boarding sports like wakeboarding, snowboarding and riding her Onewheel. She has one cat, Kepler, who gently screams at her around breakfast and dinner times. |
Vera Guttenberger (Working at a Startup Panel)
Hi, I'm Vera and I am currently working as a Product Designer at Klaviyo. I graduated from Tufts with Computer Science and Cognitive & Brain Sciences, and after interning for a bit as a front-end developer I transitioned into UX/UI design. After graduating, I joined a big consulting firm for a couple years, designing mostly data analytics tools. There I worked across different industries and clients and at different stages of the design process, but I wanted to transition to something that was product-focused in a more collaborative environment. So I recently started working as a Product Design at Klaviyo, which is a mid-size company that offers a marketing software platform for ecommerce businesses. Some of my industry interests are bolstering design + development collaboration, data visualization, color theory + typography, and accessible design. Some of my non-industry interests are rock climbing, digital art, reading, and baking bread :) Check out my portfolio at verag.me! |
Jade Chan (Working at a Startup Panel)
Jade Chan is the founding CTO at Juniper Behavioral health. She graduated from Tufts University (’17) in Computer Science and English Literature, and spent four years at AWS — first as a software engineer, and then as an engineering manager. Jade is currently at Juniper, a New York based startup building software to make behavioral health more available and accessible. Outside of work, she spends her time reading, doodling, skiing, and cooking. |
McKenzie Welter (Working at a Startup Panel)
Hey, I'm McKenzie. I work as a Software Engineer at LogRocket doing full-stack web and SDK development. I graduated from Tufts with a BA in Computer Science, and jumped straight into my first web dev job less than a month later. Over time I developed a deep understanding of the struggles of tracking down and fixing production web app issues, and I also learned how invigorating and critical it was for me to be empowered to solve hard problems all the time and to have a say in what those hard-problems were going to be, based on how they'd best serve end users. All of that is what brought me to my current job where I'm excited to be an active |