(We'll be announcing more every week!)
Jessica Hall
Chief Product Officer @ Just Eat Takeaway.com
Nerosh Raga
Managing Director @ Accenture
Samantha Jacobs
Global Senior Director Digital Technology, Strategy and Portfolio Execution @ Adidas
Aurelija Plėtienė
Director of Engineering, Data @ Vinted
Suzanne McVey
Marketing Director EMEA @ Globalization Partners
Tülay McNally
Director of Inclusive Design & Product @ Electronic Arts (EA)
Siobhan Neiland
Senior ID&E Leadership Client Lead @ Amazon Web Services
Inge Meeusen
Head of Manufacturing, Logistics and Quality systems @ Toyota Motor Europe
Saskia Groenewegen
Principal Expert XR @ Ordina
Nerea Ruiz de Gauna de Santiago
Senior Data Scientist @ Theory + Practice
Nouran Mahmoud
Senior Software Engineer @ DAZN
Sally Clarke
Co-Director @ Human Leaders
Maria Morais
Business Development & Strategy Director @ SAP Consumer Industries
Kari DePhillips
CEO @ Content Factory
Kim Beelen
Cryptography & Development Working Student @ Roseman Labs
Maria Eleni Kokkini
Cryptography & Development Working Student @ Roseman Labs
Mansi Gupta
Founder, Design Strategist @ Unconform
Ludmila VonThun
Sales Engineer @ Snowflake
Leonie van der Sleen
Sales Engineer @ Snowflake
Vicky Bunyard is the IBM CTO for Northern Europe. She has a background in Systems Engineering and Enterprise Architecture and has spent time in primarily technical transformations ranging from software engineering process and methodology redesign through data and analytics, to Enterprise Architecture and Technology strategy. The result is that she truly understands that technology is only one part of the equation and technology in context is the way to success.
She firmly believes that technology can be 'the answer', but only when we truly understand 'the question' - and that it is not about how great the tech is, but about how great we can be when we are backed by great tech.
As General Manager for Microsoft Netherlands, Anke den Ouden is responsible for bringing Microsoft's mission to life – to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more – for all Microsoft customers and partners in the Netherlands. Den Ouden has been part of the Microsoft family for 25 years, where she started her career at Microsoft Germany in various roles in the fields of marketing, sales and business management. She then held leadership roles within the business and consumer markets at Microsoft Russia and Poland and in the Central and Eastern Europe office. Den Ouden's in-depth knowledge of the Microsoft organization, its culture, customers and partners, gives her a strong position to further orient the organization towards what customers and partners need in their digital transformation.
Anke gets her energy out of sports, travelling, cooking, reading and whatever feeds her appetite to discover and create, together with her team, great stories that positively impact our countries and communities.
Tanuja is Managing Director of Amazon Web Services (AWS) EMEA, responsible for setting EMEA strategy and guiding the company’s growth across the region. She leads multi-country, cross-functional teams who work closely with customers, from startups through to the world’s largest enterprises. These teams support digital transformation, providing insight on the technical and business aspects of cloud computing. The AWS EMEA team works alongside partners, including independent software vendors, advisory partners and system integrators, to help customers innovate.
Tanuja has more than 25 years of strategic, commercial and operational experience. She joined AWS from the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where, as a Partner, she was responsible for leading enterprise transformation projects in the technology and industrial sectors. Prior to this she served as CEO, UK & Ireland for Schneider Electric, the global energy management firm. Tanuja spent 10 years with Colt as CEO of UKI and Benelux, and was head of strategy for EMC in North America in her earlier career.
Tanuja serves as non-executive director on the board of London First and was previously a trustee for Save the Children UK. She is committed to diversity projects and founded the PowerWomen Network—a cross-industry network for senior women business leaders. She has been recognised for her work in inclusion and diversity as a top-50 Champions for Women in Business by the Financial Times’ HERoes in 2017 and 2018. Tanuja also hosts a podcast, PowerWomen Speak, on what it takes for women to be successful in business.
She is an international citizen. Born and educated in India, with a Master’s degree from Boston University, Tanuja has lived in London for the past 19 years.
Divya Kumar is Global Digital CFO at Ingka Group, the largest IKEA retailer. She leads digital business steering, acquisitions, partnerships, information security, data privacy and decision analytics globally. She was earlier part of the exciting journey to open the first IKEA store and ecommerce in India. Currently an India Board member, she steers the expansion of the digital hub in Bangalore. Divya has 23 years of experience in Strategy, Finance, Digital & Analytics, is a certified Independent Board Director and has worked in various industries across US, Europe and India.
Yi He leads business, marketing and branding strategy at Binance. Yi led the business strategy of Binance’s growth from zero to one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges and pivoted the company to a global blockchain ecosystem from a China-based crypto trading platform. Before co-founding Binance, Yi served as Vice President at Yixia Technology, the leading mobile video tech company behind popular mobile apps like Miaopai, Xiaokaxiu and Yizhibo, where she led branding strategy and marketing operations and was a fundamental part of the fundraising strategy that drove the firm’s valuation to USD$3+ billion. Yi was also co-founder of the digital asset exchange, OKCoin between 2014 and 2015. Under her leadership at OKCoin, the company’s market share in China increased 60 percent during a bear market and became the dominant digital asset exchange in Asia. Earlier in her career, Yi was the host of a travel show for a major Asian television network. Yi is recognized as one of the most influential entrepreneurs in the Chinese blockchain and Internet industry. She is passionate about providing transparency and empowering communities in the cryptocurrency industry and championing economic freedom through her personal experience of breaking socioeconomic barriers. Throughout her successful leadership in crypto companies, Yi helped to create a trend of hiring female executives in the male-dominant tech industry and gained the crypto market’s trust in women leaders.
Carol Parillon became Chief Data Architect in January 2020. Professionally her passion lies in enabling data-driven organisations, to help drive the energy transition and digital agenda. During her 17 years in Shell, Carol has worked across a variety of businesses where she has used her skills to build data architecture foundations. This has accelerated the data-driven journey that Shell is on today. What contributed to this was her delivery of the latest refresh of Shells' Enterprise Data Model coupled with the data product delivery. She currently manages the functional excellence agenda for around 200 data architects in Shell.
Carol holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Mathematics and a Master’s Degree in Business Information Systems. Her purpose is to champion Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to create an inclusive environment, empowering teams to challenge the status quo, and bringing about innovation.
Her non-working time is spent with her husband, Neil, her son and 2 daughters. Next to that she enjoys volunteering in the community and school/university engagements where she teaches young students about the value of pursuing and exploring your passion beyond your current circumstance. She believes it is important for young people to recognise there is no limit to their ability to achieve.
Monique is an energetic IT leader, with bundles of positivity and a strong passion for human dynamics and organizational change. Her desire for fast-pace and transformational environments, with interpersonal communication as a critical success factor, has defined her career so far. She started her career working in large programmes focused on business and IT redesign, ranging from HR transformations to IT & process implementations and Merger & Acquisition deals. In 2017 she made the transition into IT Management, increasing her focus on strategy, leadership, and talent management.
She is currently working as Chief IT Operating Officer @Shell, where she is leading a team of ~100 IT professionals delivering secure and reliable IT operations within key conventional oil and gas locations across 10+ countries, including some of Shell's largest and most remote assets.
Monique is a strong advocate of intent-based leadership. She firmly believes that bringing people together around a common purpose and making the love for what you do infectious, are key catalysts for empowerment in the workspace.
Fun fact: Monique loves to explore different countries and cultures. She temporarily lived in Mississippi, Guatemala, and the UK and spent a year travelling through Latin-America. Her last trip was a 2-month campervan trip through Scandinavia during a family sabbatical with her husband and 2 young kids in 2021.
Madalina Suceveanu joined Liberty Global in April 2022, as Managing Director - Mobile and Cloud.
She is also a Director on Telenet’s Board of Directors.
Prior to this she has held several senior leadership positions at Vodafone Group PLC, including CTO of the European Cluster, Turkey and Egypt and CTO of Vodafone Ireland. She was responsible for supervising the implementation of technology strategies and investments, facilitating innovation and talent management in seven Vodafone markets in Europe, as well as Egypt and Turkey.. She has also served as Chief Networks Officer at Vodafone in Germany since October 2021.
Prior to her career at Vodafone, Ms. Suceveanu took on various responsibilities at Orange Romania S.A. between 1997 and 2013, with her most recent position being Chief Technology Officer, which she held for three years.
Ms. Suceveanu was also a member of the board of directors of the Vodafone Ireland Foundation, Orange Foundation, Netshare Ireland and SIRO, a joint venture between Vodafone Ireland and the nation's state-owned electrical utility, ESB.
In 2017 Ms. Suceveanu was recognized by Silicon Republic 2017 as one of the top 25 female leaders in technology in the world.
Naina Bhattacharya is the global Chief Information Security Officer at Danone, in charge of cybersecurity strategy and transformation. Naina is an advocate of diversity and inclusion in technology with a focus on increasing the representation of women in cybersecurity. She is the co-sponsor of Inclusive Diversity for the IT & Data teams globally at Danone. She is featured in the top 100 CISOs worldwide for the last two years, is recognised on the top 100 HERoes role model list of women leading by example and contributing to diversity in the workplace, and is the winner of the 2020 Women in Leadership award from Financial Times, the 30% Club and Henley Business School.
Belinda is Chief Information Officer Three, having previously been CIO at Centrica Group PLC and also Transformation and Digital Director at Vodafone, she is passionate on dispelling the myth there are significant barriers to entry for women in technology, and is an advocate of using exercise to increase productivity, efficiency and peace of mind. She was the only girl COBOL programmer in her company in the mid-nineties trying to fix various millennium bug issues, so is a closet geek. She is originally from Cardiff in South Wales but currently lives near Newbury, Berkshire with her husband and 10 year old daughter, Scarlett. In her spare time, Belinda is a running freak and regularly runs ultra-marathons, recently completing a 32 Mile non-stop run around a 400m track….and yes, she did get very dizzy and very bored!!
Andrea Morgan-Vandome is the VP of Technical Product Management (TPM)for Global Technology at NIKE, Inc. In this role, Andrea leads the vision, strategy and product management for products and design focused on retail, sports and technology. Andrea joined Nike through the Celect acquisition, where she was its Chief Marketing Officer. At Nike, she was quickly promoted to VP of Demand and Supply Management (DSM) Technology, leading the development of technology strategy and roadmaps as well as investments focused on digital demand sensing, in-season optimization and supply and inventory.
A leader in retail and innovative technologies with more than 20 years of experience, Andrea has held multiple VP roles for IBM Watson, where she led product, design and go-to-market for the $6B Watson Cognitive Solutions business, and Oracle, where she drove product management and go-to-market for the global retail business unit. Andrea has a degree in Astrophysics from the University of Cape Town. She currently lives in Boston.
As the acting VP of Product and UX at Booking.com, Adrienne Enggist leads the product strategy for a diverse, cross-functional selection of teams charged with making Booking.com the easiest way for travelers to build, manage and experience their trips.
Adrienne joined Booking.com in 2010 as one of the company’s first dedicated product owners and has been an integral figure in growing and developing the consumer product department. Over the years she has helped launch and build teams for a number of consumer-facing product initiatives including email marketing, the Genius loyalty program, Guest Reviews, and the Booking Assistant.
Adrienne has worked in the airline and online travel industries since 1998, holding a variety of different roles with Icelandair, XL.com, the Avion Group and the Holiday Extras Group. Prior to her career in e-commerce and digital travel, she was a professional chef. Adrienne is originally from the United States and currently lives in Amsterdam with her family.
Ashley Bellview is Senior Director, Global Communications at Booking.com. In this role she is responsible for overseeing employee, executive and thought leadership communications. Having first established a robust internal communication function at Booking.com, her current focus is discovering new ways to drive employee engagement, build brand advocacy and increase corporate participation in key industry topics.
Before joining Booking.com in 2014, Ashley worked at the intersection of technology, communication and hospitality, helping new businesses scale through digital marketing channels and emerging technologies. Always curious, Ashley has also been a butcher’s apprentice, a field reporter, a bartender and a novice pyrotechnic operator. Her least favorite part of any romantic comedy is the third-act misunderstanding, and she holds a bachelor's degree in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin.
Originally from Austin, Texas, Ashley has lived and worked in multiple cities across the world. Leaving New York City before it made her hard and Northern California before it made her soft, she’s now sought a happy medium in her home in Amsterdam.
Alison is the SVP of EMEA at Snowflake, where she is focused on building the team and strategy to accelerate Snowflake’s hyper-growth in EMEA.
Alison is an experienced technology sales leader with 20 years of experience in the software and enterprise applications industry. Ali is passionate about developing technology sales organizations that are deeply focused on customer value; the business always comes easily when the customer understands the impact the product can have.Outside of her career accomplishments, Ali is a mother of two teenagers, a wife, a cook, a fitness enthusiast and a strong advocate for the advancement of women in sales careers. Ali has a Criminal Justice degree with a focus on Sociology and Political Science from Washington State University.
A Fun Fact:
Ali loves extreme workouts and if she didn’t have the brilliant career that she has she would own and run a fitness boot camp studio.
Julia Hempel is the Global CIO of Adevinta, a global online classifieds specialist, operating digital marketplaces in 15 countries. With 40+ trusted brands in leading market positions, Adevinta runs a resilient business model at the centre of the second-hand economy.A German/Swiss national, Julia studied Business Economics at the University of Zurich and has spent most of her career working in large multinational companies, including ABB. She joined Adevinta in October 2019 and is responsible for the transformation of the internal Business Technology Services, Cybersecurity and global Procurement organisations in order to support the delivery of the new Adevinta operating model following the acquisition of eBay Classifieds Group in 2021.
Julia is a firm believer that everything starts with the individual. She gets her energy from authentic people who surprise her everyday, and believes all of our roles need to be lived openly and respected so we can all feel complete as people.Away from work, Julia is the mother of a 5-year-old and lives in the vibrant city of Barcelona, a place she fell in love with due to its amazing architecture, climate and multicultural flavours. She loves all winter sports as well as scuba-diving, the arts and wine!
Fun Fact:
At the age of 25 Julia decided to take a break from ‘normal life’ to work as a reef guide at the Australian Great Barrier Reef.
Patricia Walsh is Global Head Technology Transformation. In this capacity Patricia will partner with our global Commercial colleagues to design, develop and deliver digital and technology solutions in support of healthcare professionals, patients and other key stakeholders.
Prior to joining Novartis in July 2021, Patricia was with Pfizer, Inc. for approximately 17 years. Most recently she served as Vice President, Pfizer Digital Global Commercial and Chief Business Office Client Partners.
During her tenure with Pfizer, she held several positions of increasing responsibility in the areas of digital and technology with both US and global remits. Her time with the company provided the opportunity to enrichen her career through a variety of key roles, such as Global Technology lead for the Capsugel business, Global Technology lead for Pfizer Consumer Healthcare and her last position leading Commercial engagement with the pharmaceutical businesses. These roles afforded the opportunity to work alongside her business counterparts to develop and execute business aligned digital strategies.
Before joining Pfizer, she was with AT&T where she held various positions also of increasing responsibility. There she gained experience in areas such as Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, External Affairs and Commercial Business and Program Management.
Patricia holds a Master of Science in Business Management from the College of St. Elizabeth and Bachelor of Arts in English from Montclair State University. She also completed an Executive Leadership development program with the London Business School. Patricia enjoys spending time with her husband, Chris, and two children, Courtney and Connor, and their Cavapoo, Sally. Additionally, in her spare time, she likes playing golf, skiing, and spending time at the Jersey shore.
Fun Fact: I love baseball.It's my favorite sport. The reason is that it's the long game, and you can come back and win. I see it as a great motivator in your career or when working in a difficult situation or on a difficult project
In January 2022, Liesbet Snoeck became VP and Head of the Data Architect Chapter within the recently established Data Unit at the Volvo Group. This unit has the goal to unlock the power of data for the full Volvo Group. In this capacity she is coaching and growing the data architect community in the Volvo Group and driving the competence shift from on-prem data architecture to data solutions in the cloud. She is responsible for realizing best practices and architectural patterns to accelerate the value creation from data for the Volvo Group.
Liesbet brings a deep knowledge and understanding in data architecture. She has been working with data for the last 20 years, of which 15 years in the Volvo Group, taking on a variety of roles and responsibilities in the data deliveries throughout the years. In addition to her passion for data, she is also raising, together with her husband Jonas, 2 teenagers, Bendt and Hannah. These teenagers are the main reason for her drive to contribute to shaping a world we, but also our children want to live in.
Kalpana works at the intersection of global organizations, culture and people and is a passionate advocate for creating inclusive, diverse, and equitable spaces for all. She helps organizations develop and implement inclusive talent strategies for significant impact on the business, employee experience, and employer brand.
Most recently, Kalpana served as the inaugural Chief Diversity, Inclusion and Talent Officer at Kering, a luxury fashion group, where she developed the global Diversity and Inclusion mission and strategy. This included building inspiring initiatives to create authentic behavior change and designing inclusive talent processes to drive systemic change around attracting, recruiting, developing and retaining talent.
Just prior, she was Managing Director at leadership consultancy Russell Reynolds Associates, where she co-led the firm’s global Diversity and Inclusion practice and advised and partnered with clients on their talent strategy.
She has navigated several industries - systems consulting, consumer, leadership advisory, higher education and non-profit, as well as diverse cultures and perspectives, having worked and lived in 7 countries across the US, Asia and Europe.
Sonja is a market infrastructure expert at the European Central Bank (ECB) working on the digital euro investigation project. She is currently on leave from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where she was an economist and digital expert. In that position, she provided policy recommendations and technical advice to member countries on digital currencies, including central bank digital currencies, and national digital strategies. Sonja also worked across departments on macro-economic surveillance missions, including several assignments in the Asia Pacific region, research projects, and internal and external capacity building efforts. Most recently, Sonja worked on the G20 roadmap to enhance cross-border payments. As one of the founding members, she helped guide the development, operations, and governance of the IMF Innovation Lab. Sonja holds an MSc from Georgetown University and an MA from Bonn University.
At DiversityHero Gillian is helping to accelerate greater D&I in the tech industry through data and sharing knowledge between businesses.
At VanMoof She’ll help realize the vision of making electric biking the default transport choice for moving around our cities worldwide. As president, she will lead the company’s management team and oversee business operations, helping to further solidify VanMoof’s position as the breakthrough leader in today’s rapidly growing mobility category.
As Booking.com’s Chairwoman, she advised the company’s leadership on the long-term vision and operations for the business as well as key growth initiatives. Previously, Gillian served as Booking.com’s President and Chief Executive Officer, a role she was appointed to in 2016, following her experience as President and Chief Operating Officer as well as other positions at the helm of Booking.com’s Global Sales, Operations, IT, Content and Customer Care departments. Under her leadership, Booking.com has advanced its operations and sales across more than 225 countries and territories around the world.
Suzanne Rijnbergen is Associate Director ICS and Cybersecurity at Accenture and leads the Resources Security business in the Netherlands. She has 15+ years of experience in information security, both in IT and OT, and is experienced in advisory services for C-level clients on supply chain security risk and third-party risk management.
Suzanne is a true changemaker and combines strong technical, business and managerial knowledge. She has solid experience in both operational technology, privacy and IT security. Suzanne worked for public and private organizations in this field and has good insights in the threat landscape and business strategy to secure organizations in the digital ecosystem.
Suzanne's career covers, amongst others, the following (inter)national management experiences:
Suzanne holds an executive MBA from Nyenrode University and has a special interest in Privacy.
Fun fact: I tend to focus all my fear and doubt on spiders, so then there is nothing left to worry about. Yet, especially just after summer, this focus horrifies me when spider season starts. My previous employer provided me a spider-fear-course to get over it.
Filippa Hasselstrom is Head of Low Latency Live Streaming at Prime Video. Filippa leads the team who are developing a low latency solution for live sports on Prime Video. This solution differentiates Prime Video’s live sports offering by providing ultra-low broadcast latency as well as supporting synchronized viewing across clients and camera feeds, enabling features such as multi-camera viewing, watch parties and gamification.
Filippa joined Prime Video and Amazon in 2020 as part of the acquisition of Sye, a low latency streaming solution. Prior to this acquisition Filippa was the VP for Sye at Net Insight. Filippa has worked in the delivery of live video for over 15 years and her professional experience covers live production, live streaming, and live transcoding.
Filippa has a Master Degree in Physics from the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology.
Elza Ganeeva is a Head of Government Relations, Eurasia, at Zoom, where she strives to ensure that governments and businesses unlock the potential and benefit from modern communication opportunities. Passionate about the impact of digital technologies on societies and economies, she enjoys addressing emerging digital policy questions and helping shape the future policy landscape. A firm believer that communication is at the heart of being human, Elza is particularly interested in the changes in our daily communication patterns in a new hybrid world.
Kristy Fenton is a Sr. Director of Digital Analytics at Adidas, driving Digital data product development focused on areas such as behavioural data, membership data, outlier detection, automated diagnostics, and data governance. She has extensive experience growing Digital startups and scaling Digital propositions at large matrixed corporations. She is American and has been working in tech for 20 years. She holds a BA in English and Linguistics from Colorado State University and began her career building text and map-based search products.
A Fun Fact: Played tennis competitively in high school and college, past top-ranked player in New York State for under 18
With roots in tech and UX Design, I discovered my passion for Product Management more than 10 years ago. At adidas, my teams have been behind mobile apps at the intersection of e-Commerce and communities over years. Today, I’m leading transformational initiatives getting us technically and organizationally ready for the future.
A Fun Fact: At our welcome lecture at uni (fall 1999) we were told by the head professor that there won’t be jobs for us anyway as “this internet wasn’t going to be a thing”. I am glad he was wrong.
Fiona is a senior director of engineering at Optum, where she leads a global team of engineers delivering solutions for the Optum Health and Enterprise Clinical Technology Business. . Before joining Optum, Fiona worked at IBM as a program delivery lead for Watson Health. Prior to this, she worked for various IT companies as a software developer. Fiona has more than 20 years of experience in software engineering and holds a degree in Computer Applications from Dublin City University. In her professional life, she has two passions – people and technology. She believes that a strong team is vital to the success of any technology organisation: empower engineers, trust them, and they will build solutions that will radically change healthcare administration and monitoring. On a personal level: she enjoys spending time with her husband and two teenage children; has a black belt in kickboxing and has completed a half Ironman.
Rachele Gianfranchi is Heading Government Affairs at Everbridge since January 2021. Here she amplifies the resilience to critical events message with international Governments and Multilateral Donors.
Rachele advocates for the contribution of Everbridge technology to Global Public Safety and Security. Her work is actively promoting private-public cooperation in research and innovation initiatives. In her 20 years of experience, she has worked for the World Bank, and the European Commission, founded a consultancy firm and performed a C-level role in external affairs in the largest European, dedicated IT network. As a mother of two young adults and married for 21 years, she is fascinated by women’s daily resilience to life.
Stefica Divkovic is the Senior Vice President of Everbridge leading EMEA and Public Safety unit globally. Stefica has held several executive positions in the telecommunication and SI industry in her 25-year career. Stefica is a strong believer in servant leadership and her specialty is organisational transformation, winning culture and creating high impacting cross functional teams. She loves building strategies in a complex environment of non-standards. Developing and building strategic partnerships GTM Strategies, BP development, client sourcing strategies and building innovative market solutions.
Since 1993, Stefica volunteers in different NGOs that provides assistance and relief for woman and children traumatized due to war.
Belen is VP of Product at Babbel, where she leads the innovation team building a new group classes product, Babbel Live. Prior to Babbel, Belen led the international roll-out of SoundCloud’s monetization options, and was involved in the product development and marketing teams of online ticketing & retail companies.
Fun Fact: Belen loves improvisation theatre, you can find her on stage at Berlin comedy clubs
Katarzyna Rybnik is the Deputy of Group CTO at a German-Dutch based brokerage fintech, flatexDEGIRO. In this role, Kat is responsible among others for IT's continuous transformation to ensure the future-proof of the company’s IT platforms.
Her life motto has always been “Those who want, will find a way. Those who don’t will find an excuse.” Throughout most of her professional career, she was leading transformational venues, driven either by the company’s strategic goals or by technological challenges. In the majority of cases by both. Most of her last year’s professional efforts has been focused on mergers in financial markets and their impact on the IT landscape. Before joining flatexDEGIRO in August 2021, Kat has been acting as Managing Director reporting to Board levels in companies like Microsoft or Ericsson, and most recently – in one of the largest national banks in Poland.
Caterina (Cat) is currently leading Strategic Operations, with a main focus on Agile. Cat is all about enabling people to reach their best potential, a true believer of the individual's superpowers. Coming from the Dutch digital marketplace Marktplaats, she has expanded her reach to other Adevinta marketplaces globally. Cat is set to co-create the future of Agile, facilitating in building strategies that make people thrive.
Cat is a digital innovation professional with a proven track record in Advertising. In her former role as Account Director at digital experience agency TBWA, she coordinated 7 multi-disciplinary teams and multiple leading brands. With over 17 years of experience in her field, exploring different (tech) roles and entrepreneurial opportunities, Cat is truly a hybrid expert of the digital craft.
Fun Fact: Teen Cat(17) was scouted as "creative" at a renowned advertising agency and started her career as Art Director, for McDonalds and Albert Heijn.
Mounia is a Director of Research at Spotify, and the Head of Tech Research in Personalisation, where she leads an interdisciplinary team of research scientists, working on personalization and discovery. Mounia also holds an honorary professorship at University College London. In January 2022, she took an additional appointment as a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. Before that, she was a Director of Research at Yahoo, where she led a team of researchers working on advertising quality. She also worked with various teams at Yahoo on topics related to user engagement in the context of news, search, and user-generated content. Prior to this, she held a Microsoft Research/RAEng Research Chair at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. Before that, she was Professor of Information Retrieval at the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London.
As a Head of Product for the Real Estate customer unit of OLX Group, Sona Dagesyan is responsible for defining the Seller and Monetisation strategy, driving the company's growth across four countries and facilitating the digital transformation. Sona is a passionate product professional, who throughout the 15 years of her career in Product Management was curious to identify and solve the future problems of the customers. Starting with the customer first, taking the ownership and being humble at work is her secret recipe in product management. Sona joined OLX Group in October 2021 and started hiring and developed high performing product teams. Prior to her career at OLX Group, Sona was driving digitalisation and innovation in Real Estate and Telecommunication industries at ImmoScout24, Orange FT Group and MTS Group.
She is a free citizen in a free world, who was born in Armenia and has lived in Berlin with her husband and 2 daughters for the past 8 years. Sona holds an EMBA degree from ESMT, speaks 4 languages, loves travelling and spends all her free time with her family.
Svetlana Smolina is IT and Data Director, responsible for automation of Danone entities in Benelux geography. Svetlana is passionate IT professional seeing her role in bridging digital solutions with business growth and efficiency. She is a leader of international diverse team currently going through a transformation aiming to become an agile business partner and enable a success of Danone functions.
Svetlana finds classroom trainings very difficult but hardly spent two years without getting new knowledge, and now she is going through an MBA program at Rotterdam Erasmus university which is quite a workload!
After almost 25 years in the IT sector, working mainly for large System Integrators, Lior has made a change in her career path and works now for Globalization Partners as Partner Group Director.
She developed her career towards Management roles leading large teams locally in The Netherlands and worldwide.
Lior combined People Management with IT Delivery roles for 10 years and then decided to make a 'switch' to a sales role focusing on Partnerships & Alliances.
Within Globalization Partners, she is responsible for Strategic Partnerships for Benelux, South Europe and The Middle East.
In her role, she actively seeks to establish and maintain long term trusted relationships with partners.
Lior is an Industrial Engineer by education and in the past few years she equipped herself with coaching skills, having completed training and obtained professional certificates such as Master NLP and Organization Constellation.
Alessandra Sala is Director of AI and Data Science at Shutterstock; Global President of Women in AI (https://www.womeninai.co); Technology Advisory Board Member at CeADAR (http://www.ceadar.ie); Governance Committee Chair at the Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training in Machine Learning; and Member Of The Board Of Advisors at Continuous Ventures. 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.
Source.ag is accelerating access to fresh fruit and vegetables with A.I. powered greenhouses. Their team of experienced engineers and plant scientists has partnered with the world's leading growers to build the sector's most advanced artificial intelligence. Our proprietary algorithms simulate plant behavior to define and execute optimal cultivation strategies, taking into account millions of data points on climate, biology, and resources. By enabling more growers to operate more facilities more efficiently through our pioneering tech, Source is making greenhouse agriculture accessible, profitable and globally scalable.
Before joining Source, Liesbeth was part of the Artificial Intelligence team at Prosus, a global consumer internet group and one of the largest technology investors in the world. There, she led a multidisciplinary team of data scientists, designers and engineers to discover and launch AI-by-design products. She also worked as strategy consultant at McKinsey&Company. She has degrees in both Physics and Art History – and loves to find ways in which science and art meet.
Claudia is born and raised in Romania. She followed computer science majors since high school, and graduated from university as a software engineer. She has been leading multiple teams, from platform infrastructure and data engineering to lean startup product teams. She previously worked in the banking industry and the e-commerce industry. Since moving to The Netherlands, she joined the Ebay Classifieds Group, where she worked with large-scale distributed systems for the biggest classifieds sites in the Netherlands, Belgium, and the UK, headquartered in Amsterdam. Being a software engineer by background and at heart, she believes that successful technology organizations are built on a foundation of a strong culture and engineer empowerment, by making our decisions based on data and leaving the ego at the door. She joined Maersk as Director of Engineering with the ambition to bring the lean startup mentality and engineering excellence practices needed to deliver a scalable and customer-focused experience in the supply management field.
Fun Fact: I love drawing and watercoloring and I do art live streams 2 times a week, and my 2 lovely cats Hup and Deer always join in.
Born and raised in a city of 25 million people, Shanghai, China. Lived in Barcelona and now settling down in a city of 25 thousands on the Rhein in Germany. Youjia has demonstrated her passion on IT Service Management in different countries and is now leading a team of 200+ personnel to support a user base of 75,000.
Jennifer Wang, Head of Tmall Global in Europe, joined Alibaba five years ago. She and the Alibaba team have successfully brought many international brands to the China market and helped them understand the dynamics of e-commerce. She offers market expertise, updated category insights, and practical strategies to improve the effectiveness of market entry and successful operations in China. Prior to Alibaba, Jennifer worked for one of Philips’s subsidiaries for 10 years as Head of Operations covering order desk, supply chain and logistics. Combining her SCM background with a commercial role in e-commerce helps her to digitalize the business approach with SMEs. Jennifer holds an MBA from Rotterdam School of Management.
Jennifer chose to work for Alibaba because someone at the breakfast table in a cafe suggested it! She certainly has the key attributes – she loves to spend time browsing products online. Also, she is Chinese, but she has lived in Europe for 20 years.
Married with two adult children; proudly Indian while considering the Netherlands to be her second home. Travelled widely fuelling her interest in people and cultures. Committed to voluntary work in the sanitation space. Passionate about art, drama, public speaking, politics and developmental economics. Runs a Confidential professional women’s organisation, speaks in public forums, experiments with cooking and has learnt to ski!
Christine is F-Secure's Chief Technology Officer, previously holding the title of Vice President, Tactical Defense Unit where she led the defense services team that creates rules and detections that power the F-Secure's security products against latest threats and creates external reports. Christine is highly respected in the cyber security industry and speaks regularly at peer-to-peer and business events. With the last couple of years being unprecedented for security breaches, Christine has been sharing her in-depth knowledge with audiences on various areas that highlight some of the threats encountered in cyber- attacks during this period, especially those affecting mobile devices, software, supply chains and data hacks.
With our world transforming digitally and becoming even more reliant on virtual environments, that are increasingly powered by AI and ML models, it is key to stay informed and protected. Throughout her career Christine has held roles that have researched and analyzed web threats and privacy issues throughout the security landscape and across key industry sectors including pharma, automotive, manufacturing, finance and logistics. Christine's technical background was launched with a BS in Computer Science.
Valentina is a former corporate leader at Fortune 500 companies, with over 15 years of managing teams. As COO and Head of People of Ancore Strategy, and MD of Coco Consulting, she focuses on helping leaders and founders to create the systems for people to perform at their best — driving results and innovation. Equity, Diversity and Inclusions are more than buzz words. As a woman of mixed heritage, with a background in engineering and a career spanning from FMCG to Industry to tech she experienced exclusion and lack of diversity first hand, as well as the outstanding business results that an inclusive team led to.
Sampada is a thought leader with over 10 years of experience in roles spanning Digital Transformation & Automation. Her key experience is in the Financial, Purchasing & HR domains ranging over several Shared services & Contact centers all over the world.
In her current role as Head of Center of Excellence – Intelligent Automation at Bosch Service solutions, she is responsible for building & steering automation strategy for the organization along with a global network of automation developers and architects.
Her latest endeavour is into the Cognitive world of Automation, for driving the identification of digital trends with a focus on upcoming Market needs and organizational future strategy.
Fun Fact: Sampada is also actively working in various national parks to resolve human-wildlife conflicts using technology as a solution.
Camilla Bjorkqvist has a long career within the Data space, specializing in the Transformation that goes along with Data & Analytics. Having worked in consulting, banking, FMCG and now the Healthcare industry, she draws on her experiences to implement successful Change and Transformation within large organizations. Some highlights from her career include implementing Serious Gaming while working at Deloitte; being the Chief Data Officer for Global HR while at ING Bank; leading Data & Analytics Transformation within Danone and now; Leading the EMEA Commercial Data Strategy & Execution work within Johnson & Johnson MedTech. She brings the business and people side to the table at every conversation and is passionate about mentoring young female talent in the Data & Analytics space. Having worked as a cruise hostess for many years on Viking Line, she is a fun-loving entertainer on the stage, who loves a challenge.
Sue Li is a technical product leader who has been working with startups across the US and Europe since 2013. Passionate about education technology and mastering all parts of product development, she has held roles from full stack developer to Chief Product Officer to UX designer. She is currently the CTO of SwipeGuide.
Rita is a modern-day fusion of British nationality with Indian heritage, living the expat life in the heart of “Silicon Docks” Dublin, Ireland. She majored in Politics, Philosophy & Economics, but was even more compelled by the role technology is playing in shaping the world.
Today, Rita leads the customer acquisition and onboarding unit for TikTok EMEA. In this capacity, she strives to help businesses sell their value to potential customers or investors using creative TikTok advertising strategies, whilst also helping her people discover and communicate their own value in the workplace.
Prior to joining TikTok, Rita held several positions of increasing responsibility in technology sales at both IBM and Google, notably, driving business in every continent on the globe (apart from Antarctica of course). These roles afforded the opportunity to consult a vast range of Fortune 500 companies and SMBs on topics ranging from revenue generation, creative & programmatic advertising, cybersecurity and information technology. Whilst the positions varied, Rita uncovered a common pattern across all markets, industries, teams and people - the ability to learn and apply sales skills, regardless of your job title, can lead to more credibility, confidence and ultimately success.
Based in Manchester in the UK, Robyn is the Head of Leadership Development and Manager Enablement globally at Booking.com. The focus of her work in every role is to ensure people can deliver in their roles today, how people and businesses can prepare for the roles for tomorrow, and ensuring teams of people can work effectively together.
Before Booking.com, she worked for a charity that supported schools in the most challenging circumstances by bringing in great leaders to work there, specialising in working with subject matter experts progressing into broader leadership roles, either through heading up organisations, or moving into positions of national influence.
In the private sector Robyn has set up and lead learning and talent departments, and is now Head of Leadership Development and Manager Enablement at Booking.com.
Anto is an IO psychologist and she started her career in career counselling. Her career took very interesting twists and turns as she navigated the practical and tactical applications of her psychology know-how. From training SMEs to share their expertise through learning & development, leadership development, to OD & talent management informed by leadership and learning and all the fun things in between. She spent the last 12 years close to tech SMEs and leaders, and she even played for a while with a tech start-up aiming to address work engagement.
Roxana Turcu, Head of Application and Platform Security, joined SoSafe mid 2021 with the mission to build a high-class security team and now she is leading an interdisciplinary team of security specialists with offensive and defensive skills, that are working together on defending SoSafe environment. Originally from Romania, she relocated to Germany five years ago which triggered her transition to the cybersecurity world.
In her last 10 years she worked for different companies having different roles starting as a Developer to IT Security Manager and later as Application Security Engineer. Most of her career being in the payment industry gives her solid knowledge in payment security and regulation.
Fun fact: Roxana loves to travel and to discover different cultures.
Gemma is a Director of Operations at Freetrade, one of the UK’s fastest-growing fintech that is on a mission to get everyone investing. While Gemma's day job is running Freetrade’s Operations teams, which is central to building an investing community, she is also a wife and mum and continues to learn how to navigate the career/parenthood "juggle". On top of this, Gemma is also the People and Organisational lead for Together in Tech, an organisation focused on building a community within the tech sector. Before joining Freetrade, Gemma worked at Google and Snap Inc.
Roxana is a Programming Technical Director at Ubisoft Bucharest. She has a background in Computer Science and has been working in games for more than eighteen years in different companies around the world. Her day-to-day job is all about creating beautiful, compelling games that run at peak performance. She leads and implements strategies to tackle a variety of challenges, such as integrating innovative visual technologies in a game running at 60 frames per second with millions of players. Her work ranges from low-level code, trying to optimize and squeeze out an extra millisecond of processing power, to detailed analyses of technology trends and the latest scientific research that could be leveraged to make better games.
Fun fact: She used to have her own radio show talking about travel experiences
Professional with a background in statistics, sociology, and business. Currently leads a team of data scientists which use data to help Uber make better decisions about their Payments Products for users on Eats and Rides.
Marca Hagenstad is an economist and sustainability advisor who leads development and implementation of corporate sustainability strategies from the product level to the company level. She focuses on innovation, data and analytics to drive targeted activities and long-term value creation. She has proven experience in engaging stakeholders and crafting collaborative solutions. Marca advises companies in determining and communicating climate change risks (following TCFD recommendations), setting emission reduction targets and developing plans for the circular economy. Marca also designs systems for supply chain data collection and management, and supplier development programs and trainings.
Fun Fact: Marca enjoys exploring mountain ranges of the world, especially when they are covered in snow and she can ascend the mountains on her splitboard.
Bhagyashri has 16 years of experience in software testing and DevOps and is currently working as a DevOps Lead at Irdeto. She works with customers to create a secure infrastructure for continuous integration, deployment of solutions, and automation. She enjoys learning about different cloud services and working with a team comprised of various experiences, backgrounds, and knowledge. She enjoys working with cross-function teams and being DevOps lead she gets that opportunity every single day. She is equally passionate about technology and people. She enjoys the work she does and looks forward every single day.
Fun Fact: I enjoy gardening and making fun DIYs with my 9-year-old son.
Sheena Hargrove is a Solutions Consultant at Nexthink, Inc. Her technical career began with a B.S. degree in computer science. She has over 15 years of experience in the End User Computing technology space. She has held many customer-facing positions ranging from deployment, consulting, and solution engineering, and specializes in digital transformation solutions/strategies for large enterprises.
Sheena is an advocate for diversity and inclusion in technology and has held various leadership roles within employee resource groups. She has created multiple partnerships and programs for organizations to champion and cultivate talent pipelines from historically black colleges and universities (HBCU). She believes mentorship, partnerships, and representation are the keys to creating a more diverse and equitable technical workforce.
Kathy Matfes is a Solutions Consultant at Nexthink in the New York area. She has over 20 years of extensive experience selling solutions for some of the largest technology vendors including: IBM, BMC Software, Mercury/HP, and Riverbed/Aternity. Kathy’s expertise is in the monitoring and digital technology management space having helped architect Systems Management, Application Performance Management and Employee Experience Management solutions across a variety of customer industries. She has worked with some of the largest customers in the NYC area including Citi, JPMC, Merck, KPMG, Deloitte, and many others. Kathy always brings a unique combination of technical and interpersonal skills to any sales opportunity she is involved with.
Fun fact: Kathy was born and raised in snowless Lima, Peru, she learned how to ski while studying in Buffalo NY, and now enjoys skiing with her family.
Sibylle Tretera joined “her lovebrand” Pinterest in London earlier this year, where she is leading the team of Creative Strategists for Europe. Her passion for creativity, innovation and technology has defined her career path throughout, which led her to drive strategic and creative partnerships with numerous global brands and their creative partners across various technology platforms. Prior to Pinterest she was driving Google’s creative business partnerships across Central Europe out of London and Hamburg.
Sibylle has a special interest in behavioural psychology and is excited about how technology can positively impact society. She is also an accomplished executive coach and mentor, working with clients across the globe.
Part of SoSafe's Security team, leading their SOC team. Her responsibilities are defining security monitoring and incident response for the company. With a background on electronics engineering, Daniela started her career as Mobile malware researcher for an AV company in her country Chile and later joined the security operation center world working as security analyst and later she moved to Estonia where her knowledge as incident response and working for the blue team crew.
Fun fact: Daniela is a homebrewer of craft beer.
Sarojini McKenna is a Co-Founder of the breakthrough NFT Metaverse, Alien Worlds, one of the world's most popular blockchain games. She has bridged traditional business practices with decentralized communities and concepts since the early days of cryptocurrency. Prior, she spent more than four years in M&A at Rothschild in London and has represented equity on Boards of Directors. Saro holds an MA Hons from Oxford University where she was a Mrs. JH McKeown scholar.
Fun Fact: Saro became a yoga teacher and owned her own yoga studio in London after her initial departure from Rothschild Mergers & Acquisitions
Lauren Fearn is the Director of Support at Zapier. Lauren has over 11 years experience managing technical support teams for SaaS businesses and has spent the last 4 years of her career managing remote global teams at Zapier. Lauren is passionate about elevating the voices of women in the workplace and is responsible for member professional development for the Women Of Zapier Employee Resource Group. Lauren has run successful internal workshops at Zapier on the concept of Imposter Syndrome which have been added to the company onboarding process for new hires.
Tine is a manager in the IT department of Toyota Motor Europe, focusing on Business Productivity. Her team mission is to enable all TME employees to connect, collaborate and communicate from anywhere and on any device. This is maybe slight different to what ‘normal’ IT teams do: it is about change management, it is about explaining things in a simple way, having patience and empathy, and ultimately trying to make a difference on a human level. This ties in perfectly with Toyota’s company mission to produce happiness for all.
Her passion for change management is also present in Tine’s activities for diversity & inclusion and wellbeing in Toyota Motor Europe. She was one of the drivers and pioneers for the gender diversity program in the IT department. And maybe not surprisingly, one of the key triggers for this was her visit to the Women in Tech conference in 2018. This event with so many female role models was a real eye-opener for her and her colleague Elena. On the train trip back from Amsterdam to Brussel, they started counting how many female managers they had in the IT department at Toyota Motor Europe and they showed the rather depressing graph to their executives. This was the start of a series of successful activities to increase diversity and inclusion.
Out of work hours, Tine loves to travel the world, she just came back from 1 month remote working in Kenya, she loves adventures, learning about new cultures and taking pictures of her journeys.
Yulia has 12 years of experience in project and program management. She has been always working in FinTech domain: from small PSPs to well-known merchants who build their own payments solution. Yulia’s specialisation is payments integrations and migrations. Yulia joined Mollie as the very first Technical Program Manager and she currently leads the Cloud migration program.She graduated from University of London with a degree in Management and digital innovation. Over her career, Yulia obtained several certifications related to program management, including PMP and SAFe SASM. When applying her expertise, she enjoys building relationships with all types of stakeholders and tailoring processes to the team needs.
Sonali is currently leading the Personalisation and Recommendations data products at Adevinta. In her role, she leads a diverse and multidisciplinary team of data engineers, data scientists, products analysts and product managers to discover and develop ML/AI based data products to provide a meaningful experience to the customers.
She is a data and tech professional with a passion for innovation through new technologies. Prior to this role, Sonali was leading the Digital Transformation Tribe at Henkel for the Laundry and Home Care Business where she focussed on factory solutions for smart factories with ML/AI, AR, IIoT and Connected Worker.
Sonali is based in Amsterdam and works in a global setup. She has degrees in Strategy as well as Electrical Engineering and is currently pursuing executive leadership program at Stanford.
Véronique joined Sanofi in 2018 as a founding member of the Consumer Healthcare Global Digital Business Transformation team.
She now leads one of the major digital patient engagement programs in Specialty Care.
Prior to Sanofi, Véronique was engaged in shaping General Electric as a digital industrial company, by creating new business models to scale the Digital business unit across the EMEA region, as head of the strategy.
Véronique joined GE in 2013 as part of a leadership program and led various strategic marketing and product leadership positions. Prior to GE, Véronique built a strong track record in growing businesses at Siemens and Capgemini. Véronique holds an MSc in Engineering from SupOptique (2005) and an MBA from INSEAD (2012).
Véronique is passionate about new ventures and digital technologies, enjoys solving issues and pioneering new concepts is a corporate entrepreneur and is committed to creating great working environment. She lives in Paris with her husband, daughter and son.
Anna joined Sanofi almost 2 years ago bringing over 10+ years of experience in marketing, digital and CRM. In her role as a Campaign Service Owner, she provides countries across the globe with the right channels, capabilities and services to build engaging customer journeys.
Before joining the pharma industry, she worked in entertainment, finance, IT and e-commerce. Back in time, she also worked as a journalist for the biggest Polish radio station.
Working in different industries and various countries (she lived and worked in the US and Chile) makes her comfortable to rise to challenges in a fast-paced environment. She is passionate about new technologies and doesn’t mind if people call her a ‘nerd’.
She holds a Master’s degree in Journalism and Marketing & Management from the University of Warsaw.
Fun fact: Anna had a chance to live and work across Europe (Portugal and Spain during her studies), in the US and also in South America, and considers that one of the most important life experiences. With confidence for the more to come in the future.
Dalia El-Shimy is an engineer-turned-academic-turned-user-researcher. She currently leads UX Research at Miro, a discipline she's helped build there from the ground up. Before that, she was one of the first researchers at Shopify, where she helped scale the practice from a few researchers to a team of 60 strong, and co-led the craft across the entire organization.
She completed her PhD in engineering at McGill University, doing research that largely focused on the intersection of human-computer interaction and music technology. When she's not busy asking too many questions, Dalia spends way too much time trying to figure out how to adapt her North American baking recipes to German ingredients, and/or obsessing over all things David Bowie.
Sofia has extensive experience within the Intelligent Automation field, working across strategic, tactical and operational automation initiatives, using the full automation toolbox within RPA, BPN, NLP, OCR and Process Mining. With more than 10 years working in the tech industry Sofia has supported multiple global organizations in implementing technology which drives business and human value. Sofia brings agile understanding and lean thinking to her work, guiding businesses in operational models and change management to fully utilize the values required to drive digital transformation.
Susanna is a tech-driven professional with a passion for innovation in automation. By using emerging technologies, change management and an entrepreneurial mindset
Susanna helps businesses build long lasting automation programs at scale which help transform the way they work. Focusing not only on current processes but also finding the best way to use digital co-workers and other technologies. All with the objective of finding innovative ways to drive digital transformation in ways they didn't think possible.
Head of Head of Front end Support Services in the technology domain at EUROCONTROL, a pan-European organisation supporting European aviation by delivering technical excellence and civil-military expertise across the full spectrum of air traffic management. An holds a degree in Computer Science and has been working in IT since 1999 in a variety of technical and management roles. Before joining EUROCONTROL in 2018, she worked for many years in the IT department of a big Belgian bank.
Air Traffic Management Validation Expert and Project Manager in R&D at EUROCONTROL. Camille holds a MSc. in Airport Management, joined the EUROCONTROL Graduate Programme for three years. At the end of the programme, she was offered a position as Air Traffic Management Validation Expert at EUROCONTROL Research Centre in Paris, where she worked on short-term and long-term innovative projects, primarily with air traffic controllers and airlines.
Assia Kostelna is Engineering Manager at Fonoa, a company that helps high-volume internet marketplaces and merchants automate taxes across the globe through their easy-to-use API.
She leads the core product team dedicated to helping big companies be tax compliant across the globe. She has a Master's degree in Software Development, certified by Cisco, and studied in Portugal and Sweden, and yet she believes self-education is the most powerful tool available to anyone.
Growing for 10 years in software development from Junior software engineer to Tech Lead she also got involved in recruitment, education and product management.
Working in big enterprises, mostly for outsourcing companies, she has been through all kinds of obstacles. She changed her career path to make a bigger impact and understand the purpose of her work.
Abby Seneor is a serial entrepreneur, technology expert, change-making altruist, and one of the world’s leading minds in artificial intelligence, focusing on Ethical AI.
Abby believes that the only way to build intelligent machines and achieve AGI is by collaboration across all disciplines to better understand nature and the human brain.
Based in Spain, Abby recently became Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Citibeats, an award-winning social data platform that uses ethical AI to gain actionable insights. Prior to joining Citibeats, Abby served as a CTO of Optimi Health, a London-based sports SaaS, where she spearheaded efforts for accessible physiotherapy and sports medicine through cutting-edge science and technology. Prior to Optimi, she founded additional tech and AI startups such as By The Way and BookEscapeRoom. Abby also served impressive roles for Intel Corporation, Dane-Elec, Polycom, and Microsoft, working in the innovation labs and cutting edge technology in Computer Vision.
With passion and demonstrated skill for software development, leadership, and deep learning technology, Abby was recognized by Sifted as one of Europe's significant female CTOs. She was chosen out of nearly 70,000 nominations and 195 finalists from 27 countries as the winner of the "Global Awards – Women that Build Edition” in the "Tech Entrepreneur" category in 2021.
A seasoned engineering leader who has two decades of experience working in the world of technology in various roles growing up to engineering leadership roles. I have worked both with engineering teams and team of teams as an owner and primary stakeholder of the technical roadmap and developer productivity.
I have also represented Engineering interests in several organizational trifectas and love to create synergy between Product and Engineering to help create High performing engineering teams. Educating various stakeholders about technical debt while creating a pragmatic roadmap to help solve it is a particularly fun challenge I enjoy.
Fun Fact: I love to write and privately fantasise about writing like Jane Austen. In real life, I settle on writing on my favourite topics about Engineering management, leadership and technology.
A Scrum Master and a Team Coach with a heavy focus on giving teams the autonomy and helping organizations grow. In her career and personal life, she starts with trust and builds up on that foundation embracing people for their unique qualities. She comes from Poland, resided in Ireland and, currently, in the Netherlands – living in different countries helped Marta embrace and promote diversity & growing together in all aspects of life. She wants to share that knowledge with as many people as possible.
Fun Fact: Absolutely fascinated with psychology and never says no to pizza!
Daniela Filipe Bento, from Portugal, is a Senior Software Engineer in charge of Platform's development. Daniela is an advocate of diversity and inclusion in technology with a focus on LGBTIA+ community, mainly Trans, Non-Binary, as well, other gender diverse.
Besides her degree to be in Astronomy & Astrophysics, she has always had interest in platform related technologies, since her first work on IPTV platforms. At this moment, she works as a Software Engineer but also she collaborates with the Site Reliability Engineering team.
She believes that technology can have an important role in the future, but for that it’s necessary to change the way we look at STEAM
Since 2014, Daniela is voluntair in several ONG's (being actually at the board of one) which does Advocacy, Community Support and Formation on LGBTIA+ subject, mainly on Trans and Non-Binary community.
Daniela is also learning DJing, Music composition, and photography. She loves to write and play with her cats.
Nishant is the Founder and CEO of TBWAX, a full service customer experience agency, helping leading brands to create engaging & disruptive digital customer experiences. He founded the digital experience agency in 2010 which became part of TBWA (Omnicom Group) in 2014. Next to this Nishant is an Angel Investor & Advisor in Digital & Metaverse ventures. Nishant has worked on hundreds of digital projects for small and large clients in the last 12 years. He has technical knowledge, an eye for digital craft and is well experienced in digital/CX strategy for A brands. As an entrepreneur and investor he is always searching for innovations and the next best thing in digital marketing. Nishant was part of the Mobile and Digital Craft jury of Eurobest last year.
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 teams that made Training Magazine's "Training Top 125" 10 years in a row. 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.
Sophie Op den Kamp is Managing Director at The Fabricant, where she heads business operations and is co-leading the fashion industry into an equitable, collaborative, digital-only era.
After working as campaign officer at Greenpeace, Bei was Editor-in-Chief and Head of the Chinese Department at Dutch broadcaster RNW Media. She then launched the digital China department at RNW and represented the Netherlands in China during the International cultural & media exchanges. Bei co-founded with Christiaan FIVE group, is a frequent guest speaker on cultural communication and has developed the Digital China minor at the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. Bei is cofounder and Board Member of Pan Asian Connections (PAC), an aspiring Dutch broadcaster, is on the jury of the Mobius Advertising Awards and keynote speaker at Advertising Week Europe.
Ponomareva is a creative director with a decade of experience, focused on delivering smart, human-centric concepts that shape cultures and inspire positive changes in the world. She is on a mission to transform the advertising industry into a better, more inclusive, equal, mindful and diverse place. As a creative, she doesn't create ads but thinks of the bold, provoking, and uncomfortable concepts that can evoke emotion and leave a mark. As a leader, she encourages creatives to develop ideas that bring more common sense to the industry and purpose-driven work to the world. Having worked at agencies across the globe, she is a true global citizen. She has launched creative unicorns across seven different countries and has worked with a wide range of high-end brands. She has won numerous prestigious awards including Cannes Lions, D&AD, Epica Awards, Eurobest, and New York Festival.
With over a decade of experience working as a software developer, Jessica joined Incubeta in 2013 as a Business Unit Director - migrating her experience and knowledge into robust marketing solutions for both the business and their clients. In 2019 she moved into a new position as EU Director of Strategy, creating and directing innovative and thoughtful strategic solutions to complex brand and communication challenges, both internally and externally.
Across the course of 2020, Jessica focused on restructuring Incubeta business across Europe, optimizing and structuring the team to generate more focus and localization for clients. This restructure resulted in 6 new leadership positions across the Benelux, France, DACH and Nordic regions, enabling deeper, richer relationships with clients which led to stronger partnerships and increased revenue for Incubeta.
Sibel Atasoy, Frontify’s Head of Data, is an experienced data leader with a demonstrated history of working in technology companies in various industries, including Ava Women, eBay and PayPal. She has a deep understanding of the data technology space and analytics methodologies. She is passionate about building powerful data capabilities, has a deep focus on data quality, and is a strong advocate for data literacy.
Born in India, having graduated from Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU), she started a career with Embedded Software Testing in India. Sangeetha Subramani is a self-driven, reliable professional with 10 years of experience in Automotive Software. She is skilled at identifying problems and finding creative solutions.
In her current role, she works as a Defect Manager for MBition GmbH - where the innovation of next generation infotainment systems for Mercedes-Benz Cars happens.
She masters the whole process of analysis, maintenance and improvement of the complete defect lifecycle management. Sangeetha is the go-to person for managing interfaces towards customer platforms to deliver the highest quality of the Mercedes-Benz user experience.
Privately she is happily married, speaks 6 languages and believes in the value “Win as a Team”.
Women Rise is the latest art project by the artist, Maliha Abidi. She is a Pakistani-American published author and visual artist. Her work focuses on advocating for social justice including women’s rights, gender equality, girl’s education and fighting for the marginalised communities. Maliha has been sharing stories of incredible women through her art and illustrated books for over 9 years. She has worked with amazing organisations such as UN, Global Goals, Malala Fund, Adobe, Google, and many others. Her work has featured on various media platforms such as The New York Times, Good Morning America, BBC, TRT World and more. Maliha is excited to bring the amazing 'rising women' to the NFT world. Maliha Abidi’s 2nd Book, RISE, was launched on the 4th of November 2021. Special book give-aways are planned for Women Rise collectors. Check out her social media for past, present and future projects!
Diliara continues to grow as a well-known female founder and Angel throughout Europe. She currently leads operations at Impress as COO, company that she co founded in 2019.
Impress is the number 1 chain of digitalised orthodontic clinics in Europe. Born in Barcelona in 2019, in just 3 years, they've grown to pioneer leading care, flagship clinics and state-of-the-art tech across 8 countries and more than 120 locations. With more than 900 employees, they have revolutionised the invisible orthodontic sector with the best team of professionals specialised in making people smile and using the latest technology for the diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up of all cases.
Their aim is to improve people’s health and quality of life across the globe. Their business model has been recognised in the top fastest-growing HealthTech companies by Forbes, by the Barcelona Dental Show, and they are currently listed as a LinkedIn Top 10 start-up.
Maria is a Greek-expat experiencing the London life… and weather! With a Data Science degree and a lot of curiosity about how coding and data can unlock new ways of solving problems, her journey to the data world started. Maria has worked as a Data Scientist and an ML engineer for the past 4 years, where she experienced how data actually challenges and transforms the way we think and operate.
Today, Maria is working as a Solution Architect @Databricks where she helps businesses leverage data and AI to solve their data challenges at scale. Her passion about new technologies and cloud infrastructure comes as no surprise as well as anything related to automation and simplicity.
Irina Pushkina is the Technology Innovation Lead at the future-forward innovation engine Lab271 of the Dutch company Schuberg Philis.
She comes from a deep technical background with industrial R&D projects and prior to that with a proven record of academic research projects. Her interests include simulation software, technological trends and digitalization initiatives that drive business transformation.
Irina holds a PhD degree in high-performance computing theoretical physics from Hiroshima University (Japan) and various qualifications in Software Engineering, Professional Scrum and Artificial Intelligence. On top of that, she is an award-winning professional and a public speaker.
Hanna Asmussen is the CEO & Co-Founder of Localyze, a global mobility platform for companies and employees. With a passion for living abroad, having been an expat for 10 years and speaking 6 languages, Hanna co-founded Localyze after seeing the pain points associated with moving internationally for work.
She believes that international talent contributes to our societies' economic, social, and cultural development and increases multicultural diversity in organizations. Her involvement in the Open Employers Pledge supports a common European labour migration policy that should help employers attract, retain and relocate global talent.
While the past year has been marked by constant changes and challenges in global mobility, she sees the opportunity in Hybrid work setups as key to successfully enable hyper-growth for companies all over the world. Localyze recently closed a $12M Series A round and is accelerating its European expansion.
Fun Fact: Hanna was very curious to explore different job fields and has had 5 jobs parallelly when studying. The jobs varied from harvesting asparagus to writing articles for a university magazine.
My name is Maryia Tuleika and I'm a Lead test automation engineer at Regent AB, primarily working in automated backend testing and embedded systems with main focus on test architecture for backend systems and leading test automation in one or more teams.
Having 10+ experience in broad spectrum of industries helps me focus on the important things and to find balance between hard work and having fun in the office. I'm an eager tools, techniques and cases learner, both technology- and process-wise.
As a consultant currently I'm part of the band at Spotify where I work at one of the innovative embedded projects to make enjoying music when driving even easier!
Fun Fact: I love being out in the nature and depending on who you ask I engage in hiking a bit too much or not enough!
Sarah Afshari is the founder & Managing Director of DISS-CO, a legal tech and Compliance-as-a-Service company. She has more than 18 years of experience in combating white-collar crime. As the Director of a big4 company, she was responsible for international investigations and compliance audits, distributor, and supplier audits for companies from different sectors.
As the Compliance Officer of a listed construction company, she improved the compliance management system and was responsible for the internal investigations. Sarah founded DISS-CO to offer SMEs a modular and easy-to-use compliance SaaS. The enterprise solution offers internationally operating companies the most flexible solution that reduces compliance costs and creates efficient project and task management.
Corneel Braber is a Data Science Craft Lead at bol.com, the largest e-commerce platform of the Benelux. After finishing her MSc. in Finance at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, she started her career at ABN AMRO bank. Following up on her keen interest in data, she decided to change her career and got enrolled in the MSc. Data Science at King’s College in London. After completion with distinction, she joined a cryptocurrency gaming start-up in London. In the Netherlands she progressed her career at bol.com
Dr. Aleksandra Kovachev is Data Science Manager at Delivery Hero, one of the world's leading online food ordering and delivery marketplaces and a European startup unicorn. With her team of multi-disciplinary Data Scientists, she is on the mission to build world catalogue of dishes and customer taste profiles using state-of-the art Machine Learning models.
She has been in the field since 2016. Before that, she completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering in Skopje, with focus on complex networks.
She is a big promoter of women in technology, organising, supporting events and mentoring female colleagues since her University days.
Fun Fact: I try to pick new skills & hobbies every now and then: sewing, figure drawing, pole dancing, interior-design...
Aoife Foley, IEEE Senior Member, Reader, School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Queens University Belfast.
Aoife is a Reader in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Senior Member of IEEE. She is a Founding Member of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society U.K. and Ireland Chapter. Dr. Foley is also Editor in Chief of Elsevier’s Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews and an Editorial Panel member of the Institution of Civil Engineers Proceedings in Transport. She has a BE(Hons) (1996) in Civil Engineering and a PhD (2011) in Energy Engineering from University College Cork and an MScEng (1999) in Environmental & Transportation Engineering from Trinity College Dublin.
Lisanne is the winner of the Dutch Digital Talent Award 2021. After changing the direction of her career path in 2020, she now successfully leads the commercial Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics teams at Van Lanschot Kempen as a Product Owner. Combining a creative background in Fashion and Communication with Digital Business Management, Lisanne enjoys challenging those around her on different ways to reach set goals. She is an AI expert who drives initiatives on various topics, such as continuous digital transformation and becoming a data-driven organisation.
Alienor is a French back-end Golang developer with a decade of experience in various domains, from social media marketing to satellite imagery and e-commerce. Through the course of her career, she tried her skills as a front-end developer, as a project manager, and enjoyed a time as technical leader and software architect, all the while reaching for quality and simplicity in her software.
Last year, she joined HelloFresh in Berlin, where she is decoupling and reshaping the software supporting HelloFresh Market, towards a domain-driven and event-supported architecture.
Out of work hours, she travels the world for Scottish country dance events, knits, sews skirts with pockets and reads about linguistics and feminism.
Freya de Mink is business development lead at Roseman Labs, a software company that enables secure data collaboration with Multi-Party Computation (MPC). Data is key to innovation, yet combining data from different sources is difficult when sensitive data is involved. Roseman Labs has a cryptographic solution to help organizations collaborate without exposing sensitive source data.
Freya is building commercial opportunities with a focus on healthcare applications, and works closely with customers to deliver insights and value from data. She will talk about the technology and what it brings to clients, and how to build a diverse tech team in a deep tech niche. Before joining Roseman Labs, Freya worked in strategy consulting at Boston Consulting Group. She holds an MBA from London Business School.
Fun fact: I trained as a classical pianist and earned my income for a while touring with musical theatre productions.
Tiffany Stahl is a Manager of Business Development at SHARE NOW, the European market leader in free-floating car-sharing. She loves orchestrating a wide network of strategic and public partners to make cities more liveable and car-sharing more widely available. As a result, Tiffany’s role is shaping the franchise product, making SHARE NOW's fully digital mobility solutions available to a global market. In this regard, resilience and innovation are key drivers for her daily business.
Before joining SHARE NOW she worked in the U.S., helping companies expand their reach and fulfill their missions.
Fun Fact: Loves hosting her own podcast named "Rerouting: Navigating Parenthood"
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffany-stahl/
Jillian started to learn Python during her Masters in Biological Diversity and has never looked back. This led to a 12-year career in financial technology, specializing in electronic trading support. She moved to the Netherlands from London to join Optiver in 2020 after meeting them at a conference, and currently leads the Trading Operations team. She lives with her husband and two daughters just outside Amsterdam.
Mel is an internal pentester at Adyen with over 8 years of experience in the cybersecurity industry. In her current role, she performs full-stack penetration tests to the platform across the organization. She previously worked with various industries including critical infrastructure, manufacturing, finance and public sector to assess and help remediate their cybersecurity challenges. She holds a master's degree in telecommunications engineering.
Fun fact: When I’m away from the keyboard you will probably find me in a dance class!
Mayke Ploeger is a Technical Team Lead at Adyen. The Amsterdam based payments company has been expanding rapidly since it was founded in 2006 and is still showing continuous growth. Mayke joined the tech company as a Technical Support Engineer after successfully completing university degrees in both Mathematics, Physics and Nano Materials in 2017. She progressed quickly within Adyen and was promoted to Technical Team Lead within 2,5 years, making her one of the youngest team leads within the company. In July last year, she formed a new, multi-disciplinary team to start working on a new product, catering for the future of in person payments. It’s ready to go live this summer.
Natalia is an engineering leader with 12+ years of experience in building software and leading development teams. She is currently focusing on applying exemplary engineering practices in Geophy, a data-focused real-estate disruptor.
Natalia's practical experience ranges from product ownership to hands-on engineering, hence she is well-versed in both aspects. She is passionate about influencing ways of working on any scale - from an individual's personal development to strategic processes across an organisation.
Fun Fact: Outside of work, Natalia is part of a community of European folk dancers with a focus on traditions from France, Italy and Portugal.
Antonia Schulze is a Data Scientist with the Machine Learning Solutions Lab at AWS where she develops machine learning models to address customers’ business problems. She works with customers across various verticals and applies creative problem solving to generate value for customers with state-of-the-art ML/AI solutions.
Janine is a data and machine learning engineer at the Advanced Analytics department at Van Lanschot Kempen and for the past year has been helping the Client Monitoring Team discover novel forms of financial crime. Having worked in a healthcare startup, a background in psychology with a healthy dose of a can-do attitude- she is driven to use her skills in a practical and actionable manner to critically solve the smaller and bigger problems in the world and change the way things are currently being done. Janine also co-founded the local R-Ladies chapter here in Amsterdam that is actively working towards achieving proportionate gender representation within the R-community.
Deborah is the CEO of Daizy.com, an AI enabled sustainability app for the new generation of investors to understand all their investments including Web3 assets. Launched in April 2021, the Award-winning App* has already delivered over 500,000 infographics on traditional and web3 asset classes to over 25,000 users, and 8000 portfolio users.
Daizy is set to revolutionize the world by becoming the go-to investment insights provider people want, giving them all the tech-driven tools necessary to take matters into their own hands, and the advice to make sure they have better outcomes. Daizy is just beginning its journey by bringing the most advanced Web3 technology and transforming the world of investing.
Deborah is a seasoned veteran of the financial services industry. Most recently she has served as the Global Head of ESG Index and is regarded as one of the industry’s leading experts in the world of sustainable investing. She has a strong track record of success building some key growth franchises, including ESG indexes and she ran the EMEA region for MSCI indexes, and Client Coverage across Asia based in Hong Kong. A graduate of Harvard Business School and recipient of the Dean's Award for Leadership, she was named Financial News 100 Most Influential Women in European finance 6 consecutive years (2013-2018).
Fun fact: Deb's role model is her Shao-Ling temple trained Kung fu master Grandmother who fought to protect women and children during war times. She also likes to swim with sharks.
Lindsay Smith is a Senior Manager heading up Customer Success at Zapier. Linds has over 12 years of experience working in the tech industry, 10 of those working entirely remote. She has been at Zapier for over 7 years seeing the business scale from 15 people to over 600 managing global technical support teams and now heading up Customer Success to scale. Part of this journey meant Lindsay was the third non-male identifying person at Zapier and has been passionately advocating for, sponsoring and mentoring womxn at the business since then. Lindsay is also a member of Prizm the LGBTQIA+ ERG at Zapier.
Fun fact: Lindsay has a ragdoll cat called Tobias who loves to be vacuumed!
https://cdn.zappy.app/b5897c0ffaf0f1e1ff82aa83c3c27062.mp4
Katie Snell is a Software Engineer and passionate about all things product and tech. At TomTom, she writes code for the mobile navigation application AmiGO. Katie played a key role in bringing this project from its early days to the mature, cross-platform product it is now. Usually offering her perspective on product development through her blog posts, she is speaking about her engineering experiences for the first time at European Women in Technology.
Prior to founding FinchFactor in 2009 (now futurefactor), Kerrie was PR Director at Wieden+Kennedy. There she wrangled brands such as Nike and Heineken, Coca-Cola and Electronic Arts.
Today, Kerrie is a country representative for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, board member of the ADCN, and the founder of SheSays Amsterdam. She hosts, moderates and speaks on stages globally, from Cannes Lions, Ciclope and The Next Web, to Promax, Advertising Week and Dublin Tech Summit.
Zuzanna is a certified communication coach and team facilitator. She is the change maker that helps organizations to scale successfully by building strong internal and external relationships. She also is a faculty member of CRR, where she co-creates the future of organizational coaching.
She has over 10 years of experience within the biomedical field. She combines it to facilitate building strategies that feed on data, benefit the organization and make people thrive. Not by removing outliers, but by including them in seemingly impossible but truly robust solutions.
When Zuzanna is not changing the world with her coaching or data analysis, she loves to boulder, dive and connect to nature. She advocates for psychological safety, culture of inclusion and proper distribution of talents at work.
Fun fact: she has just learnt to yoga-headstand
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zuzanna-borek/
A graduate of Computer Science from the University of Toronto, Victoria has been working at Shopify for the last 4.5 years, both in Toronto and Berlin, in data platform engineering, focusing on data ingestion. Passionate about data management, privacy. and storage. Victoria has been leading the charge at Shopify for the adoption of Apache Iceberg, and actively looking for the next big thing that will transform the way we interact with our data.
Donia is a backend software engineer with 5 years of experience developing Go distributed systems in cloud environments. Having moved recently from the aerospatial field to a startup, she is building the camera of the metaverse by developing a social gaming app named Powder.
Before that, she graduated from electrical and industrial computer science with a special interest in image processing, which leads her now to explore the IoT features of Go.
Passionate by tech and people, Donia discovered tech communities, which motivated her to founding and organising the Google Developer Group Sophia-Antipolis. Striving for diversity, she is actively involved in a local women-in-tech organisation named WHAT06 running events to encourage girls students to close the gender gap and to make women in stem more visible.
Fun Fact: Donia expresses her creativity by sewing pieces of her wardrobe such as coats and blazers. She also loves challenges and ended up sewing her wedding dress in 2 months.
I am a passionate Service Designer and UX Expert with over 20 years of experience.
Today I am Experience Strategy and Service Design Director at Springbok Agency. In my job I help companies to initiate, create and improve omnichannel products, services and communication in B2B, B2C and B2B2C.
When working on projects I always focus on the needs and expectations of users, and equally on the business goals of the project's stakeholders (strategy, marketing, sales and technology). Thus, defining digital strategies that grow into value propositions, new service concepts and content, functional specifications and designed interfaces.
My deliverables result from proven design thinking methodologies: expert reviews, benchmarks, journey mapping, wireframes, prototypes, user tests and performance audits.
Ashmi is a full-time Data Scientist at a leading Telco in Germany and a self-taught (hobby) web developer. She has a master's degree in informatics, with a focus on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, from Technical University of Munich, Germany. She gets excited about new technical challenges and automating mundane activities using technology.
Besides, an avid traveller and a budding triathlete, she is also passionate about bridging the gender-gap in STEM.
Fun Fact: I accidentally became the face of women in triathlon in Germany.
LISA REINHARDT is a cyber security expert and awareness Guru at microfin. She manages the development and realisation of comprehensive and cross-industry IT security campaigns for clients. She also leads trainings in the areas of cyber and information security as well as data protection and shows companies how digital business models can be established alongside traditional IT. But overall, her main focus is to make security awareness understandable for everyone, to arouse enthusiasm for information security and thus, among other things, to raise awareness of the impact of cyber risks in the age of the digital revolution and to put the human factor on an equal level with technology. Her consulting approach focuses on the balance between technology, organisations and people.
VIVIEN SCHILLER works as an IT Security Expert at adesso in Dortmund. She has supported various project teams in the security of web applications. In addition, she gives training courses in the field of cryptography and deals with security awareness measures. For her, humans are at the center of IT security. Technical and usable IT security solutions are her focus, which requires innovative and creative ideas as well as the most diverse perspectives. That's why she also advocates for more diversity in software development and the digital industry and, together with her colleague, leads the She for IT initiative and hosts the podcast of the same name.
My name is Sajeda Sayed Hashemi and as a qualified Pharmaceutical Engineer I work as a Regulatory Affairs Manager for STOCKMEIER CHEMIE, a global chemical distribution company. As a female immigrant, born in Afghanistan, raised in Iran and gone through even more thick and thin in Germany for the past 20 years, it's been a long bumpy way for me to get here. After my Iranian 7 semesters' university certificates were "recognized" as 10th grade school qualification 20 years ago I fell deep into a depression ditch. I climbed out there and in 2008 I rolled up my sleeves and broke through many glass ceilings. My latest achievement has been my MBA in Environmental and Quality Management February this year. But my life achievement has been staying focused on my core values. Without support from some angels, who keep crossing my path, this wouldn't be possible.
Fun Fact: Funny is that even in my early 40s and as a mother of two kids I still feel that this isn't it and that no matter how old, what gender and where from, we can change our lives to the better and make a positive impact on others' lives along the way. The journey goes on!
Esther is the Head of the Community at Tunga (a staff augmentation firm) taking lead on the welfare, growth, and expansion of the 850 software developers on the Tunga platform. She is a certified project manager, an experienced Product Owner, Tech Talent Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the internet industry and IT audit with Deloitte East Africa. She is skilled in software developer management, recruitment, problem-solving, negotiation, and cost control without compromising quality.
Ilse is a hospitality tech professional with 17+ years experience in Hospitality and Hospitality Tech. Ilse has strong industry knowledge around Hospitality Distribution, PMS, SaaS, Revenue Management & Distribution Optimization.
Kelly Hickey is a Behavioral Specialist and entrepreneur who created Strong Women Co after experiencing a total lack of services to help women survive and thrive in the workplace - especially in male-dominated industries. Having personally worked in several non-traditional fields including the geosciences, resource development, construction and more, Kelly has first-hand experience of what it’s like to be a woman in an underrepresented industry. She’s taken that practical knowledge and combined it with her research and her academic degrees in Psychology and Gender Studies to create an enjoyable and practical keynote for you with great takeaways, on “How to be a better communicator.”
Born and raised in beautiful Newfoundland, Canada, Kelly now lives in the Netherlands with her husband and their six-year-old spirited daughter, Violet.
Kelly Hickey is a Behavioral Specialist and entrepreneur who created Strong Women Co after experiencing a total lack of services to help women survive and thrive in the workplace - especially in male-dominated industries. Having personally worked in several non-traditional fields including geosciences, resource development, construction and more, Kelly has first-hand experience of what it’s like to be a woman in an underrepresented industry. She’s taken that practical knowledge and combined it with her research and her academic degrees in Psychology and Gender Studies to create an enjoyable and practical keynote for you with great takeaways, on "How to be a better communicator."
Born and raised in beautiful Newfoundland, Canada, Kelly now lives in the Netherlands with her husband and their six-year-old spirited daughter, Violet.
Fun fact: Kelly is a passionate advocate for girls and women in STEM. She has designed and implemented programs for pre-teen and teenage girls to be exposed to trades and technologies so that they would be more likely to choose those fields in the future.
Kelly is a passionate advocate for girls and women in STEM. She has designed and implemented programs for pre-teen and teenage girls to be exposed to trades and technologies so that they would be more likely to choose those fields in the future.
Anita is a certified and accredited team coach and facilitator, based in Amsterdam. She specializes in team development and personal leadership development. She works primarily with teams and individuals in international startups, scaleups and non-profit organizations.
In her leisure time, she enjoys good food, good books, traveling in a campervan with her family, and surfing the beautiful coasts of the world
Fun fact: once upon a time she learnt how to program in Python
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitamontolalu/
Katie Shanahan is a Cyber Security Consultant and certified lead implementer of Business Continuity management. She is also the founder of the Next Gen Faculty for The London Institute of Banking and Finance (LIBF).
As Founder of the Next Gen Faculty, she seeks to address resilience within the Banking and Finance sector by bringing together young professionals across Digital Banking, Sustainable Finance, and Governance, Risk and Regulation to share their insights with decision makers and career starters alike. She recently ran her first guest seminar for BSc Banking and Finance students on 'Cyber Security, FinTechs and Ransomware'.
As a Cyber Security Consultant, Katie supports clients across the public and private sector, from startups to FTSE 100s, with a focus on demystifying cyber security and making security work for the business (not the other way round). Katie has led training sessions globally, including 'Operational Resilience', 'Crisis Communications’ and 'Stakeholder Management'.
Fun Fact: "I decided to do the Three Peaks in 24 Hours Challenge without training (foolish, I know) and realised on the first mountain I’m terrified of walking down mountains!"
Isabel began her career as a journalist and (later) editor, specializing in medicine, health, and science. Since 2005 she has worked as an independent trainer and coach, with a focus on communication skills training, message development, and storytelling for business.
Isabel has helped executives from all sectors, including the tech and pharma industries, to communicate powerful messages to a variety of audiences, through media interviews, presentations, meetings, and negotiations, and to develop their unique value propositions in the workplace. She has also served as moderator for advisory boards and at press conferences.
In 1992, following a personal experience with the pregnancy complication pre-eclampsia, Isabel set up a UK-based patient advocacy group, which is now international. She co-authored, with Professor Chris Redman of Oxford University, the award-winning book, Pre-eclampsia: The Facts, followed by Understanding Pre-eclampsia.
Fun Fact: Isabel knows a huge number of Shakespeare soliloquies—including all of Hamlet'—off by heart and often recites them to relieve the tedium of solo car journeys.
Fetela Ntam Yolanda is a Study Group Lead at WirfonCloud. She prepares and coordinates study plans for those preparing to write the AWS Solutions Architect Professional Certification exam. She also teaches VPC Networking to members of her community preparing for the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification exam.
Coming from a non-tech background, Yolanda is an AWS Community Builder and has passed 3 AWS certifications, the recent one being the AWS Solutions Architect Professional. Her cloud computing journey is transformative and she is passionate about cloud computing knowledge sharing and helping women build the necessary cloud skills in order to help bridge the cloud computing skill gap.
Fun Fact: Yolanda has an accounting degree and she felt she had no place in the tech world a few years ago.
Darya Kamkalova is a podcast host & producer and data industry professional. In her podcast Venturing Women, she interviews female founders, investors, and startup ecosystem enablers. Her goal is to inspire more women to build businesses and invest and ultimately, shape the world we live in. Darya’s professional experience in the data industry spans 10 years, five continents and such domains as data monetisation & acquisition, data product development, and global data marketplace business operations.
Fun Fact: Darya launched her first podcast in 2017 in German to improve her German.
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