Our speakers
Get to know our fabulous group of speakers.
Shelli Brunswick
Chief Operating Officer, Space Foundation
How to Leverage Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Vibrant Space Economy
Shelli Brunswick, COO of Space Foundation, and Executive Leader for the Center of Innovation and Education, brings a broad perspective and deep vision of the workforce development roadmap and economic opportunities available to all people in the space economy — from a distinguished career as a space acquisition and program management leader and Congressional Liaison for the US Air Force — to her current role leading the Center for Innovation and Education. <br />Shelli speaks at organizations and events around the globe to advance space technology innovation partnership and collaboration opportunities, chairs the Women in Aerospace (WIA) Foundation, and hosts the Women’s Global Gathering annually at the Space Symposium. In addition to advancing that program, Brunswick is one of only 35 women worldwide to be selected by the United Nations as a mentor for its Space4Women program. She was selected as the Diversity and Inclusion Officer / Role Model 2020 by WomenTech Network.
Stephanie A. Higa
Senior Software Engineer at Box
What frontend engineers really do (and why you might want to become one, too)
Stephanie is a senior software engineer at Box in Redwood City, California. She taught herself how to code while working in business development for a tech incubator in Los Angeles. In her current role, she creates developer tools and contributes to Box UI Elements, the company's open-source user interface library. She’s passionate about art, writing, indoor plants, interior design, and the future of technology.
Emmanuel Straschnov
Co-CEO & Founder of Bubble
How no-code is changing the development workflow
Emmanuel Straschnov is co-CEO and founder of Bubble. Bubble is a visual programming (or no-code) platform that makes programming as easy as pointing and clicking. Bubble counts more than 700,000 users; people have used it to start companies without technical resources, and have been accepted into Y Combinator or raised multi-million dollar rounds. <br />Born in Paris, Emmanuel studied computer science and mathematics at École Polytechnique and received his MBA from Harvard Business School. Prior to starting Bubble, he was a management consultant in China. He’s now based in New York.
Jack Poulson
Executive Director, Tech Inquiry
Organizing to Prevent Abuses in Tech
Dr. Jack Poulson is the Executive Director of the tech accountability nonprofit, Tech Inquiry, where he helps lead research into the public/private interface (esp. relating to tech companies) and its relationship to tech worker organizing. He was previously a Senior Research Scientist at Google focused on (conversational) recommender systems, and, before that, an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Stanford focused on high-performance linear algebra and optimization.
Patrick Colucci
Technical Training Program Manager at AWS
Side Projects Save Careers
Patrick Colucci is a Technical Training Program Manager at AWS. He manages and executes a 48-week residency program for a select group of new AWS employees in Canada. Prior to AWS, Patrick functioned as the Global Presales Manager at SAP’s Academy where he onboarded and guided early talent at SAP so they may gain the skills and experience needed to become highly valued Presales Solution Engineers. Before SAP, Patrick had the privilege of working for Apple where he had the opportunity to work with some of the most popular products on the planet.
Qianyun "Aria" Chang
Software Engineer at MediaMath
Dig Your Heels in Tech: Find Your Place through Hackathons, Research & Applications
Aria is a software engineer on the data engineering team at MediaMath designing and maintaining large scale machine learning data pipelines. She holds a bachelors in computer science focusing on AI and ML applications from UC Davis. She was named one of the top 50 Most Inspirational MLH Hackers for her heavy hackathon participation and numerous hackathon awards. Her skin cancer classification and time series seizure prediction projects were published in case studies. She also researched with professors on comments sentiment analysis, game reinforcement learning, and heart disease classification. Notably, her patent pending project at a smart grid research company was awarded one of the Best IEEE Conference Papers for using reinforcement learning to fix contingencies within the power grid. A huge part of her identity is to advocate and for women in tech. She founded a number of women in tech/AI groups to educate, empower, and inspire women.
Andra Keay
Managing Director at Silicon Valley Robotics
Robots are the canary in the AI coal mine: the risks of autonomous systems involves more than physical safety
Andra Keay is the Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics, the non-profit industry group supporting innovation and commercialization of robotics technologies. Andra is an trained futurist, founder of the Robot Launch global startup competition, Robot Garden maker space, Women in Robotics and is a mentor, investor and advisor to startups, accelerators and think tanks, with a strong interest in commercializing socially positive robotics and AI. She is also a Visiting Scholar with the UC’s CITRIS People and Robots Research Group.
Jerry Lee
COO @ Wonsulting
Using LinkedIn to Land Your Dream Job
Jerry is an ex-Senior Strategy & Operations Manager at Google and current Manager, Product Strategy at Lucid. He is from Torrance, California and graduated summa cum laude from Babson College. After graduating, Jerry was hired as the youngest analyst in his organization by being promoted multiple times in 2 years to his current position. Outside of work, Jerry partners with universities & organizations (170+ to date) to help others land into their dream careers. He's amassed 83,000+ followers and has reached 15M+ professionals.
William Hurley
CEO of Strangeworks
Hacking Quantum Today
whurley is founder and CEO of Strangeworks, a quantum computing startup that makes the power of quantum computing easily accessible and available to all. He is an Eisenhower Fellow, Innovator in Residence for the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, A Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Chairman of the Quantum Computing Standards Workgroup at the IEEE, the first Ambassador to CERN and Society, a regular contributor to TechCrunch on the topic of Quantum Computing, and the co-author of "Quantum Computing For Babies”. Prior to starting Strangeworks he was a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs [NYSE: GS]. He came to Goldman Sachs via the acquisition of his second startup, Honest Dollar. Prior to Honest Dollar whurley founded Chaotic Moon Studios which was acquired by Accenture [NYSE: ACN].
Adrienne Tacke
Senior Developer Advocate & Software Engineer at MongoDB
There is NO Developer Uniform!
Currently a Senior Developer Advocate for MongoDB, Adrienne Tacke is also a Filipina software engineer, speaker, published author of the book Coding for Kids: Python, and a LinkedIn Learning instructor who specializes in Cloud Development courses. Perhaps most important, however, is that she spends way too much money on desserts and ungodly amounts of time playing Cyberpunk 2077.
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