6-7 September, 2018
ICC Sydney, Australia
6-7 September, 2018
ICC Sydney, Australia
(We'll be announcing more every week!)
Nadjia Yousif
Managing Director& Partner, Head of UK Diversity & Inclusion @ Boston Consulting Group
Natalia Estefanía Jurado Espín
Embedded Software Engineer @ TTTech Auto
Col Dame Kelly Holmes (MBE mil) is one of Britain’s most recognizable and admired athletes. She has won Olympic, World, Commonwealth and European medals, and added the ultimate sporting trophy to her cabinet at the Athens Olympic Games – Double Olympic Gold.
Kelly, however is not only known for her medals and records, but also for her gutsy, committed approach to athletics and her ability to overcome injury and illness in order to still stay at the top of her discipline. Her strength and courage has won her many fans both within the sport and outside of it.
She started her athletics career as a promising athlete as a junior and won the 1,500m at the English Schools Championships, but chose to give up her early athletics career in favour of a career in the army. She signed up a few months before her 18th Birthday and over the next 9 years worked her way quickly up the ranks until she was a Sergeant. She joined with the aim of making the rank of Officer, but once she started to run again, initially for the forces, and started to win major titles she faced a really tough decision – army or running?
In 1997 she took a massive step and left the army, making athletics her focus and career. Her desire to be the best demands that she gives100%, something she does in everything she takes on. She has the fundamental element for success – the ability to be focused. She was awarded the MBE in 1998 for services to the British Army and was honoured by the Queen in the 2005 New Year’s honours with a Damehood.
Kelly won Olympic Gold in the 800m and 1500m races at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, becoming the first woman ever and the first Briton in over 80 years to do so.
Kelly retired from competition in the autumn of 2005 but remains heavily involved in the sport. Among her many activities Kelly has also written her autobiography, ‘Black, White & Gold’, appeared in the Celebrity TV Series ‘Dancing on Ice’, and has been appointed by the government as the first National School Sport Champion. She founded the Dame Kelly Holmes Trust in 2008 with a vision to get young lives back on track using the unique skills of world class athletes to engage, enable and empower young people.
In 2018 she was appointed Honorary Colonel of The Royal Armoured Corps Training Regiment, becoming the first person to ever be attached to a regular unit which was signed off by the Queen.
In 2019 Kelly released a new book calledRunning Life: Mindset, Fitness& Nutrition for Positive Wellbeing – an inspirational and attainable guide to how mindfulness, exercise anddietinterlink to transform your overall wellbeing. It was awarded Sports Health and Fitness Book of theYear at The Telegraph Sports Book Awards 2019.
Kelly speaks passionately on employee wellbeing and mental health, motivation, inspiration, sports, entrepreneurship and diversity & inclusion.
Advocate for diversity and inclusion in all its forms. Passionate about redressing the gender balance via advisory positions at @BigYGroup, @accelerate-Her and the @girlguiding association. "If we are to thrive in a digital future, we must ensure that we have all of our voices heard when it comes to designing technology. If we do not, we risk creating a world which is for the few and not for the many."
In 2016 she entered the @Computerweekly Hall of Fame after being voted Computer Weekly's Most Influential Woman in IT 2015; she was listed on Debretts 2016 500 People of Influence and named in Europe’s Inspiring Fifty most inspiring female role models for 2017. She was presented with the 2017 Catherine Variety award for Science and Technology and the 2018 Women in Tech Award for Advocate of the Year acknowledging her contribution to diversity. Awarded the Digital and Technology Award at the Asian Women of Achievement Awards in 2019. Listen to her life and music choices on Desert Island Discs podcast March 2019. Jacqueline was awarded CBE for Services to International Trade in Technology in the Queen's New Year Honours list 2018.
She is happily married to Roger Andre.
Listed as one of the UK's Top Most Influential Women in Tech & an international multi-award winner for her services to Diversity & Inclusion in industry, Sheree (@nirushika) is the Head of Diversity & Inclusion, Monzo; Board-Appointed Global Ambassador, Women Who Code; Contributor, Forbes.
Sheree is a global Diversity & Inclusion leader, having worked in many regions providing leadership and training to C-suite/Executive leadership to develop fully formed focused diversity and inclusion strategies. She has created tailored data driven strategies through engaging all employees, including C-suite, which has enabled authentic change. Sheree has what has been described as “infectious confidence with expertise in the diversity and inclusion space”, which leads to the ability to ensure people, of all levels, understand the business benefit of diversity and inclusion whilst becoming champions, in their own roles.
As a passionate advocate for gaining/retaining women in the industry, she launched & led the award-winning U.K. expansion of Women Who Code (womenwhocode.com), since 2013.
As an industry leader, she has spoken at many global events, conferences and leadership sessions and is regularly profiled for her work. Sheree & her work have been featured in many publications, such as Forbes, FastCompany, Evening Standard, HuffPost, Business Post, Marie Claire, Wired, ComputerWeekly, The Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Newsletter & many more. Links are provided below.
The aim of her career is ensuring people are aware of the fantastic opportunities the industry has to offer & make certain that all humans are able to benefit from these & reach their full career potential.
Debbie Forster MBE is an award-winning figure in the areas of diversity, tech and education.She is a coach, portfolio consultant and CEO for the Tech Talent Charter, an industry collective driving greater inclusion and diversity in the UK tech workforce. Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) named her Woman of the Year for 2016 and she was awarded an MBE in 2017 for “Services to Digital Technology and Tech Development”. She was awarded Women in IT Awards Diversity Leader of the Year 2019 and Computer Weekly also named her Most Influential Woman in UK IT for 2019.
Justine Roberts CBE is Founder and CEO of Mumsnet, one of the UK’s largest and most influential online communities sharing advice, support and product recommendations with over 10 million unique users per month.
Justine is a non-executive director of FTSE100 insurance firm Admiral and of the Open Data Institute founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. She is also a member of the Government’s Rose Review Board.
In 2011, Justine launched Gransnet, a website for the original baby boomer generation. She is a mother of four (and two dogs) and was appointed CBE in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to the economy.
As a leader in the Chief Technology Office for investment banking, Rini has been responsible for delivering many innovative technology programmes including Cloud, artificial intelligence and biometric authentication. A founding member of the UBS BAME employee network, she has helped to increase the network’s membership to nearly 1,000, and manages all external networking and engagements to actively promote BAME representation in the organisation. She is a board member for BritBangla and is credited for her contribution on diversity as part of the newly-launched Good Work Standard by the London Mayor’s office. Rini represents UBS at the Lord Mayor’s Appeal for City corporations chaired by Dame Fiona Woolf, and is one of the top 100 Muslim women ‘changing the script’ under Baroness Uddin’s initiative to promote Muslim women in the UK.
Sharon Moore MBE was appointed IBM UK CTO for Public Sector in January 2019. She marries the needs of industry with the potential of technology and breadth of IBM, to transform technical capability into real business results. You will often find her on stage discussing the impact and value of technological advancements such as AI, IOT and Blockchain on industry. Sharon has moved into this role following success in IBM’s outsourcing, consulting and sales organisations, building a career as a technical architect with a focus on integration and enterprise architecture.
Sharon is also a board member of the CENSIS Innovation Centre. She was honoured with an MBE in the Queen’s birthday honours 2018 for services to women in technology based industries, and presented with the 'Inspirational Women in Leadership' award at the inaugural Scotland Women in Technology Awards 2017. She is Deputy Chair of BCSWomen, leads BCSWomen activity in Scotland, and is a board member of Scotland Women in Technology.
Anne Boden, MBE, is a most unusual banker. After a distinguished career working in senior leadership at some of the world’s best-known financial heavyweights, among them Allied Irish Banks, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland, she set out to build her own mobile-only bank from scratch in 2014. She raised $70 million of funding and obtained a full banking licence in 2016, launching Starling’s first account in 2017. Since then, the bank has completed more successful funding rounds. It now operates current accounts for individuals and small businesses and expects to have opened one million accounts by the end of 2019. The Starling Marketplace, Europe’s first fully integrated financial marketplace, provides the bank's current account customers with access to third-party financial services in a compelling example of Open Banking in action. Starling’s Banking Services B2B division makes the bank’s proprietary best-in-class banking and payments infrastructure (“Banking-as-a-Service”) available to third parties.
Claire is CEO of notonthehighstreet, the leading curated modern marketplace connecting the best small creative businesses with the world. Claire joined the company in August 2019 and brings an extensive background of successfully scaling businesses and disrupting markets.
Claire Davenport was previously CEO of HelloFresh UK, the country's largest recipe box company where she oversaw a signficant expansion of the customer offering - launching rapid, family friendly and healthy options - and improvements in operational capability to grow the top and bottom line. Since stepping down from Hello Fresh at the end of 2018, Claire has advised a number of VC and private equity backed companies on scaling their businesses following funding rounds or acquisitions.
Claire started her career in investment banking and has held senior-level strategic and executive roles in companies including Skype, RTL Group and vouchercodes.co.uk. In her spare time, Claire is a “Resident Expert” at Oxford University’s tech accelerator and a panellist and speaker on the University’s business school programmes. She also founded and runs WITs END (witsendnetwork.com), an organisation supporting women in tech.
Claire has an undergraduate degree from Cambridge University and an MBA from INSEAD. She is a passionate runner and is currently running – virtually – from Aberdeen to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. She runs 500 miles a year, is currently "in" Bulgaria, and hopes to complete the run in 2029.
Lisa has 20 years in the IT industry and is a Global Inclusion and Diversity Lead and Business Operations Manager.
A keen advocate for Inclusion, Diversity and Equality, Lisa is passionate in cultivating and mentoring female talent in the technology industry.
Lisa holds an MBA and is certified ‘Leader of Impact’ for Women in Global Organisations with the American Chamber of Commerce.
Lisa is winner of the inaugural Global HPE’s Women’s Excellence Award and in 2019, a finalist for ‘Business Role Model of the Year’ in the Global Women in IT Awards and ‘Hero of the Year’ in the 2019 European Diversity Awards.
Rahma is the Director of Engineering for the Restaurants group at Deliveroo. She focusses on helping Deliveroo becoming the best partner for its restaurants and driving growth and profitability for restaurants. Prior to this, Rahma was a senior engineering leader at Wealthfront where she led the financial services area.
Sharon is a Director in Google’s EMEA Partnerships Solutions team, leading Data Trust. She joined Google in May 2011 to lead the DoubleClick Rich Media Services team, and has had multiple roles at Google leading both Client facing Technical Services and Program Management teams in Strategy Operations. Prior to joining Google, Sharon was at Yahoo! for 11 years, working predominantly in Advertising Operations and from 2007-2011 was Yahoo!’s EMEA Director of Advertising Operations. Sharon graduated with a degree in German and French from Leeds University and spent 7 years living and working in Paris. She is a passionate advocate for Diversity Inclusion and a Trustee of Graeae, a Deaf/Disabled theatre company. Sharon lives in London with her husband and 3 children.
Mary Hamilton is director of international operations at Audible, where they work in global expansion. They joined from the BBC, where they led operations for the iPlayer and BBC Sounds technology teams. Previously they were the Guardian's executive editor for audience, pioneering the news organisation's approach to audience development, community management and participatory journalism in London, Sydney and New York. They began their career in print journalism in Norfolk, and have also founded a tabletop games studio with four successful releases and a fifth in progress. They are on Twitter as @newsmary.
Sonya is a lifelong traveler who lived in the Middle-East, North Africa and Asia and is always looking for new challenges. She has made a career switch from International Business Consultant in Saudi Arabia and Singapore to Full Stack Software Engineer in South Korea to Lead Security Engineer at Photobox Group. Before coming to the UK, she was based in South Korea for 6 years where she learnt Korean and worked for several Korean companies.
Sonya is a Tech Advocate and a public speaker in the UK tech scene. She is also a mentor for women in tech, a cybersecurity writer for FreeCodeCamp publications and an active member of the tech community in London.
Her motto is #GetSecure, #BeSecure & #StaySecure
Joanne is Centrica’s Head of Mobile User Computing. She has 20+ years experiencing of working with Centrica’s field users, ensuring they have the most up to date technology to enable them to best serve Centrica’s customers. She’s also an active campaigner for gender diversity in her organisation and an energetic member of the Centrica Women’s Network. Joanne is passionate about development and has launched two mentoring programmes in Centrica. Her passion empowers her and drives her actions to make the workplace better for current and future generations. Joanne has set up a subgroup with in the Centrica Women’s Network, specifically for male allies.
Sharon is a member of the executive leadership team and has global responsibility for making Finastra an inclusive employer in the Fintech industry. She is committed and focused on empowering people to create a culture that attracts and inspires people within the Financial Services industry.
A passionate champion for diversity and inclusion at all levels, Sharon joined Finastra from Vodafone, where she held the position of Global Organization and People Development Director. Before joining Finastra Sharon instrumental in the award-winning diversity and digital work in Vodafone that transformed the culture and company. Sharon is a strong ally to the LGBTQ community and a proud receiver of an OUTstanding 2018 Ally Executives award.
Anne Marie has been Chief Operating Officer at Ocado Technology since 2014, looking after Infrastructure and Operations, organisational development, and general management. She joined the organisation in 2001, and became Head of Ocado Technology Poland in 2012. That gave her the opportunity to set up our first development office from scratch outside the UK. Before joining Ocado, Anne Marie worked in Boston, US as a Software Development Manager for Staples Inc.
Jenny is part of the global Process Innovation and Advanced Operations team at Universal Music. This team works across the business standing up new ways for consumers to find and access Universal’s music and improving the way music is created, distributed and preserved. Jenny is currently helping to shape and implement a major transformation of the ways creative metadata is captured, stored and shared in Universal Music’s systems and how it is then synchronised across the industry to make sure that when you play a song, the right people are identified and paid.
Janie is a Product Director at Trainline, where she has built and leads teams focussed on making train and bus travel easier through creating great customer experiences together with her partners in Design and Technology.
She has been lucky throughout her career to work with entrepreneurs in the tech and e-commerce world who have fuelled her passion for building products that really help improve peoples' day to day lives by making their digital experiences simple, frictionless and delightful.
Janie believes in empowering her teams to lead and innovate, and in encouraging diversity to ensure inclusivity for all audiences. In an often male dominated sector, she seeks to lead projects where at least 50 per cent of the team are women, and always a good mix of nationalities and cultures.
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is a global expert on all things gender balance. She is the CEO of 20-first, a global consulting firm working with companies interested in capturing the competitive advantage of gender, nationality, and generational balance. Her ground-breaking thought leadership is accessible through several seminal books and regular contributions to Harvard Business Review and Forbes. She’s done several TEDx talks, has been recognised by ELLE Magazine as one of the Top 40 Women Leading Change and was recently celebrated by PWN Global with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Gender Balanced Leadership. Her book, Why Women Mean Business, was awarded the MANPOWER Best Book of the Year Prize.
Emma began her career writing enterprise C# and C++, before moving into mobile and specialising in Android development. After joining Monzo in 2016, she has worked across many areas: from building brilliant new product features in the app to running the Android hiring process. She now runs Monzo's Mobile Platform squad as well as owning the Android discipline.
Tessa is Co-Founder & CEO of OLIO, a free app tackling the problem of food waste in the home by connecting users who have food they don’t want or need, with neighbours living nearby who would like it. Since launching 3 years ago, 1.5 million people have joined OLIO and together shared over 2.5 million portions of food. OLIO also publishes ZeroWasteWeekly.com, a website and newsletter that aggregates all the best zero waste news from around the world. Tessa is passionate about the sharing economy as a solution for a sustainable world.
Regina is Founder of Mainstream, a growing and international community of millennial women that are looking to share career hacks, collaborative ideas and their own personal networks.
Regina specialises in digital strategy, delivery and change management in Central Government and International Development. Regina has designed complex technology policy for UK and international governments, she has led and delivered large digital programmes across government; and she has designed architectural solutions for large decommissioning programmes in the private sector.
Regina is driven by seeing women of diverse ethnicities being leaders and role models in different industries and her work with various charities such as TalentRISE encourage young girls, especially those of African or Caribbean descent to be paired with such role models. Regina volunteers in schools mentoring girls and running workshops on confidence, life aspirations and STEM education.
Eva has been with Sky’s Startup Investments & Partnerships as a Senior Investment Manager since January 2019. Before, Eva was part of the Episode 1 Ventures team focusing on early-stage deep tech investments. From 2014, she was an Investment Director at Day One Capital, a Budapest based early-stage tech investor, until she left for pursuing an MBA in London in 2017. She sat on the Advisory Board of AImotive, a leading self-driving car startup with a full-stack software solution.
Kate currently leads the Azure Architecture team for Telco, Media and Professional Services, who working with key customers to enable them to leverage the power of cloud. Prior to this role, she led the Data and AI Cloud Solution Architecture team for Financial Serviceshelping organizations shape their data strategies in a scalable and responsible way. Her main focus lies in the intersection between technology and business, and how new technologies can shape organizations as they evolve. Prior to joining Microsoft, she worked at start-ups where she focused on leveraging big data and behaviour analytics to augment decision making.
Kate is a scientific researcher by training, specializing in neurobiological genetic engineering. During her research, she studied the influence of genetics on behaviour and survival mechanisms. She holds a MSc in Molecular Biology from Bar Ilan University and a MBA from Tel Aviv University.
Kate currently leads the Azure Architecture team for Telco, Media and Professional Services, who working with key customers to enable them to leverage the power of cloud. Prior to this role, she led the Data and AI Cloud Solution Architecture team for Financial Services helping organizations shape their data strategies in a scalable and responsible way. Her main focus lies in the intersection between technology and business, and how new technologies can shape organizations as they evolve. Prior to joining Microsoft, she worked at start-ups where she focused on leveraging big data and behaviour analytics to augment decision making.
Kate is a scientific researcher by training, specializing in neurobiological genetic engineering. During her research, she studied the influence of genetics on behaviour and survival mechanisms. She holds a MSc in Molecular Biology from Bar Ilan University and a MBA from Tel Aviv University.
Tom is director of engineering at Deliveroo, leading teams responsible for getting food from A-to-B quickly, efficiently and reliably; creating financial levers and incentives to dynamically price across all 3 sides of the marketplace; and personalisation, ranking and relevance on the Consumer site.
Before joining Deliveroo, Tom was variously a senior engineering manager at Twitter, head of development at the Press Association, and senior development manager at the BBC World Service.
Ivana Bartoletti is Head of Privacy and Data Ethics at City-based consultancy Gemserv, and supports businesses in their privacy by design programmes, especially in relation to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology.
Ivana was awarded ‘Woman of the Year’ (2019) in the Cyber Security Awards in recognition to her growing reputation as an advocate of equality, privacy and ethics at the heart of tech and AI.
She is a sought after commentator for the BBC, Sky and other major broadcasters and news outlets (Guardian, Telegraph) on headline stories where the tech economy intersects with privacy and data law and politics.
Ivana launched the Women Leading in AI Network in May 2018, a thriving international group of scientists, industry leaders and policy experts advocating for responsible AI. Their 2018 report made waves among tech leaders, international institutions and the media, who backed many of its recommendations.
Bartoletti is Co-editor of the Fintech Circle’s AI Book, their first major publication focused on how AI is reshaping financial services. Ivana's first book focuses on the socio-economic impact of AI and will be released in 2020 by Indigo Press.
Gill Cooke is the founder of #STEMConnext, a networking community based in the Thames Valley area and growing....
#STEMConnext's vision is to connect people and businesses outside of London and drive the future pipeline. #STEMConnext collaborates with local businesses, schools and the community to promote diversity, inclusion and equality.
Gill is also Head of Digital Planning & Delivery at Three UK and leads the Women in Tech Group at Three. As a STEM Champion, she is on the Advisory Board for Learning People, a Tech Education platform and is an Enterprise Advisor to a local school as part of the Thames Valley Berkshire LEP. She is passionate about equality, justice and making the workplace a better place for everyone. Gill is married and has 2 equally passionate daughters.
Liz is Head of Technology Delivery at Holiday Extras - responsible for the output, performance and personal development of a team of over 100. She has 7+ years experience in people management and leadership, focusing on developing high performance and supporting the changing needs of a growing team in a competitive industry. She prides herself on her ability to coach others to be the best version of themselves, having an engaged and empowered team and always being proactive.
Namrata Sarmah started her career as a software engineer in Bangalore (India) more than 12 years ago. She developed her career internationally and moved into Product Management after finishing her Masters at Manchester Business School in 2012. Throughout her career, she has worked in a variety of sectors like IT, FMCG, Telecom, Media Production, Healthcare, Beauty, and Broadcast. She's currently a Senior Director of Product at Viacom. She is an Advisor at start-up incubators like Antler and Virgin StartUp. Namrata also sits on the board of the Middlesex Learning Trust and few other organisations as a Non-Executive Director. She is the founder of two popular networking groups - The Career Mums Club and The BAME Leaders Network. She is an alumna of the University of Cambridge and Manchester Business School.
Recently, she has been listed in the FT Top 100 Most Influential Leaders in UK Tech.
Currently UK Head of Insight and Strategy at Aviva Digital, Rhea previously spent 4 years as Insight Director at eBay. She’s worked across FMCG, communications, financial services, media and retail in her 20 year insight career and is an experienced speaker and awards judge.
After growing up in Kenya, Anisha, moved to the UK and study her masters in Bioengineering from Imperial College London. Her all-round performance at Imperial made her a finalist for female undergraduate of the year and subsequently landed her internships at Rolls Royce UK and as a Developer for MPesa, Safaricom in Kenya. She’s now a full-stack developer within IBM’s consulting division, with expertise in Blockchain. Anisha recently won IBM iX graduate of the year as a commendation for her passion for getting more women into technology.
A young woman with an ambition for our sector to recognise the importance of women in our industry. I am currently working for BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT in our policy department developing ideas and turning them into reality for the tech sector in the UK. As an organisation our three main focuses are Diversity and Inclusion, public digital literacy and ethics, which all feed into my strong beliefs of why we need more women in tech. I have previously worked for BCS in operations and for a large FMCG company in sales. I attended Winchester university to study business management, graduating with a 2:1.
Daniel is responsible for coaching and leading a team of technical cloud transformation architects who will help customers accelerate their migration to the cloud. One of the main priorities of the role is to create a customer-centric culture, completely focused on helping our customers achieve their goals.
Aarthi Raju is a Principal Architect at Amazon Web Services who is passionate about Cloud Computing. She loves building things, so it’s perfect that her role helps partners build their businesses on Amazon Web Services. She is responsible for helping strategic partners and customers build solutions that are well architected and optimized. Prior to this, she worked as a Sr. Technical Account Manager supporting AWS enterprise customers acting as their advocate within AWS, helping them build ground breaking technologies. She holds a Master’s degree in Computer Networking from Wichita State University, Kansas.
Julia Barbosa is development and effectiveness specialist, with a consistent track-record of leading people and organisations through change, equipping others with tools and skills to thrive. She works as a facilitator and strategist, leading global strategic projects focusing on improving personal and business capability. Julia speaks and writes about personal development, the power of failure in learning and happiness in the workplace.
Grace graduated with a BASc in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada, where they did internships at IBM, AMD, and other companies. After moving to San Francisco, Grace became a fully-fledged engineer and on-call tech lead at Yammer. Once moving to London, they continued working as an engineer or tech lead of various teams at Deliveroo and GoCardless.
Beyond their daily role, Grace can occasionally be found speaking about building excellent engineering teams at conferences around the world. Grace is a winner of the Makers Women in Software Powerlist 2019 and likes getting involved with diversity initiatives aimed at helping under-represented groups become more integrated into the tech industry.
Daphne is a Software Engineer at Zuhlke Engineering UK. She completed an undergraduate degree in Engineering for the Life Sciences at Cambridge, and after moving to London and joining Zuhlke for a few years, she took a sabbatical to do a Master’s in Machine Learning at UCL. At Zuhlke, she has worked as a Software Engineer, Technical Business Analyst and Scrum Master. Her main interests include machine learning, data science and cloud architecture, and particularly their application in the medical space.
This year, she is participating in the organisation of the SPA Software In Practice conference, as part of the committee. She is also one of the organisers for Pint of Science, a worldwide science festival, which aims to inform the general public about new scientific discoveries. In her free time, she is a keen athlete, competing in athletics, horse-riding, boxing and long-distance trail running over the years, and finishing as the first woman in the Gobi Desert Ultramarathon in 2015. Having been raised in a trilingual environment, she is also an avid language-learner.
Hema Purohit is a C Level Transformation Strategist, with 25 years of experience in the IT industry. Hema has enjoyed a varied and colourful career during this time (as an individual contributor and as a leader) – encompassing Project Management, Solution and Enterprise Architecture, Solution Director and eventually to the present day working exclusively with customers and the CxO groups to develop strategy, vision and transformation journeys.
Her experience has been gained predominantly in Consulting, working for Systems Integrators and Vendors, and she enjoys challenging the status quo and driving into the real depth of why change is important and why customers embark on transformation.
Over recent years the focus of Hema’s work has shifted from technology alone, to spending more time understanding the Business Value that needs to be derived from change, and the associated Business Benefits that an organisation wishes to achieve. These are fundamental to success today, and can often make the difference between success and failure in a time where everyone is rushing to become more ‘Digital’.
Pauliina Jamsa is an engaging motivational speaker, life coach, stand-up comedian and responsible at Siemens for global enablement across 90 countries providing digital advice, leading agile projects and encouraging a fail-safe culture. She has lived in 5 countries, speaks 7 languages and has worked in agencies, start-ups and blue chips like SAP and Microsoft.
Having developed a method to overcome her social anxiety and fear of public speaking, her story from a bullied small-town girl to a global manager has been inspiring people around the world. She’s a keynote speaker, panellist and chairwoman in conferences in over 14 different countries from New York to London.
In B2B Marketing Magazine’s Top 10 list of women making the biggest impact in tech in 2019. Author of a free e-book: From anxious to unstoppable: how to be more confident at work.
Tanya is MD and Editor-in-Chief of FinTech Futures. She joined the company in early 2016, overseeing the its digital and print publishing operations and strategy. With over 12 years of experience in the industry, she has extensive understanding and knowledge of the banking/financial services technology sector and its participants, as well as of the B2B publishing business.
Cait O’Riordan is the FT’s Chief Product and Information Officer (CPIO). She is responsible for platform and product strategy, development and operations across the FT Group, working in close partnership with editorial and commercial teams. She is on the FT executive board, which is responsible for the company’s global strategy and performance.
Before joining the FT in February 2016 Cait led the BBC’s digital product development for the London 2012 Olympics and played a central role in the user and revenue growth of music app company Shazam.
Fiona Loftus is a Senior Solution Architect with Capgemini UK, where she has been working with primarily public sector clients for just over 20 years. She has been very fortunate to have had a varied and interesting carer to date, progressing through a variety of technical roles, spanning the entire product life cycle and gaining hands on experience with a plethora of technologies. Her current responsibilities revolve around Cloud adoption and migration, where she is the guiding bridge between Business Vision and Technical capabilities.
She prides herself on being a multi-facet individual who truly makes a difference. She actively drives forward a number of initiatives including working within local schools and colleges promoting technology careers, apprenticeships and degree apprenticeships. These interactions provide students with a role model that they can relate to, with an aim of inspiring them to pursue a career within Technology.
This is replicated within Capgemini where she is a key Steering Group member of the Architecture Academy, which seeks to grow and nurture talent from within, to create the next generation of Architects.
She is an extremely passionate and driven individual, with a love of technology and helping people develop, to achieve goals beyond their expectations.
Nadjia is a core member of the Technology Advantage practice at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and co-leads Financial Institutions for the UK. Her work focuses on helping banks, payments providers and insurers fundamentally change their technology systems, organisational structures and digital customer experiences. She is also the Diversity & Inclusion lead in the UK, overseeing all diversity networks and activity as well as heading up Women@BCG. A passionate advocate for empowering individuals – and technology – in the workplace, she has been recognised for her work within BCG and beyond, having placed on the HERoes 100 Women Execs List 2019.
Dr Loubna Bouarfa is a machine learning scientist turned entrepreneur. She is the founder and CEO of OKRA Technologies - an artificial intelligence data analytics company for healthcare. OKRA allows healthcare professionals to combine all their data in one place and generate evidence-based insights in real time, to save and improve human lives. Loubna is currently a member of the European Union High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, where she is particularly focused on healthcare and achieving competitive business impact with AI. She was named an MIT Technology Review Top Innovator Under 35, a Forbes 50 Top Women In Tech, and recently won the prize for Best Female-Led Startup at the StartUp Europe Awards. On a personal level, she is a strong advocate for diversity, women and challenging the status quo.
Anna is a strategic financial services marketer, tech enthusiast and advocate for diversity and inclusion.
As Head of Growth and Communications at Qadre, a fintech company which enables businesses to cryptographically manage trust and accountability with blockchain technology, Anna is driving the vision of a financial world that is more accessible, reliable and seamless.
Anna is heading partnerships at Women in Tech Revolution, a community working towards gender parity in Industry 4.0, and has been recognised as a Rising Star on the Women in Fintech Powerlist 2018 by Innovate Finance for leading the change in the fintech ecosystem.
Before taking the leap into fintech, Anna spent five years in institutional banking. Responsible for Fixed Income & Currencies marketing at Commerzbank globally, she established the digital content strategy for the investment bank and sat on the Diversity & Inclusion committee. Prior to that, she held roles at BNP Paribas in Paris and London, where she co-headed the CSR social impact working group. Anna graduated with a BSc in Business and Psychology and holds an MSc in Management from EM Lyon Business School.
Polina Frolova Montano is a Co-Founder and Head of Global PR and Brand Marketing at Job Today, Europe's leading mobile hiring app that helps businesses find staff in 24 hours. Since launch in 2015, company's apps delivered over 200 million candidate applications. The company has attracted over four hundred thousand businesses to the platform as well as VC funding from the world-class investors such as Accel.
Polina has succeeded where most have failed in reinventing of a 400 USD billion recruitment industry. As a co-founder of Job Today she's been tenacious in uncovering customer needs and bringing a team together that created pioneering mobile recruitment products. Polina holds a Masters degree in Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the University of Luxembourg and a Bachelor of Business Administration Degree from High Economical School of Amsterdam.
Polina speaks fluently Dutch, English, French, Russian ( her mother tongue), Spanish and Italian. As a serial entrepreneur, a working mother of two girls, a world-traveler fluent in six languages, Polina inspires so many people around her.
Polina is an accomplished and passionate public speaker and has represented her own story and that of Job Today in TV interviews and at international events and conferences including WebSummit, NOAH Conference, Pioneer's Festival, ICMA 2018, and more.
Rebecca is Head of the Process Automation Service in Expleo Group where she is responsible for the development and delivery of Expleo' s process automation capabilities, which support clients in the deployment of automation solutions within their organisations.
For Expleo, she has built a Global Service Offering by developing a Methodology and Best Practice Approach to implementing and deploying automation solutions. She runs the Expleo Process Automation Global Centre of Excellence, supporting the roll out of the service globally. The Service utilises a range of technologies, including RPA, OCR, workflow management, forms management, machine learning and artificial intelligence to create these solutions.
Patrick is one of the Founders of Maddox Events, the company behind The Women in Tech World Series. Maddox Events was created with the single ambition of driving equality for women in the tech realm and Patrick as a white male, has played a dedicated and passionate part in the creation and development of the business. He puts his passion down to a process of self-education that he went through in his twenties and also the inspiration he has received from the amazing women he has worked with and seen on stage at The Women in Tech World Series.
Patrick believes that men have two roles to play in driving gender equality; first to educate and support other men in terms of understanding their male privilege and how traditional masculinity can be toxic. Furthermore, Patrick believes in challenging the narrative and status quo when it comes to gender. Second, Patrick believes that men have a crucial role to play in mentoring and inspiring women to show them that anything a man can do, a woman can do just as well, if not better. Patrick leads a large sales team that is mainly comprised of women some of whom are just starting their careers; through his coaching and support the entire team is delivering amazing results in an inclusive, supportive and meritocratic environment.
Dr. Christine Bailey is Chief Marketing Officer of Valitor, an international payment solutions company. She has spent her career doing B2B marketing in technology/payments, including leading European marketing functions for Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems.
A respected thought leader and public speaker with a TEDx Talk ‘Unconventional Career Advice’ (105k views), Christine was recently voted #1 Woman in Tech by B2B Marketing, #3 female influencer in UK B2B Marketing by Onalytica and in the top 20 women leading the charge in revolutionary SaaS marketing by SaaStock.
Passionate about inclusion and diversity, Christine led Connected Women globally for Cisco and is an advisor for the European Women in Payments Network (EWPN).
Christine is also a Senior Fellow of The Conference Board. She has a doctorate (DBA) in customer insight from Cranfield School of Management and is currently writing a book on how to apply customer insight strategies to understand your audience and create remarkable marketing.
Known as “the Go-to Person for China”, Ting Zhang has 25+ years’ experience of UK-China international business, trade and investment. She first came to the UK to study at the University of Cambridge before pursuing a career in investment banking in the City of London. In 2001, foreseeing the growing business opportunities between the UK and China, Ting set up her own consultancy, building it into one of the most reputable China specialist firms in Europe. She has personally coached many leading British entrepreneurs, guiding them through the complexities and culture of doing business with China. She has provided strategic input to both UK and European government agencies on their China strategies and been a China Venture Partner for leading European VC firm, Prime Ventures, as well as an advisor to Lord Wei of Shoreditch.
Anna Keren is a Director of Engineering at Babylon Health, offers a digital healthcare app using AI. Anna's background is software engineering; she has MSc in Computer Science(Queen Mary University) and BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science(Bar Ilan University, Israel). Anna built and led engineering teams in Fintech and Life Sciences. Anna Keren made it to the Women in Fintech Powerlist 2018 as a technology professional.
Safia Agueni is a Purposeful Tech Leader with a passion for people demonstrating an entrepreneur mindset with strong willingness to make things happen.
A fulfilling and insightful career that started in computer science, developing competencies through leading multiple projects and teams in large organizations at local and global level. Being responsible to set-up a whole Digital governance function in the highly Pharma regulated environment by driving the change and supporting digital strategy execution while mitigating risks for patients. Aspiration to continue engaging in the healthcare transformation to better serve patients and shape society to enable more equality and inclusion especially in the new delivered technologies.
Kate took the Chief Commercial Officer role at City Pantry at the end of 2017 as a natural extension of her professional journey and personal values. A mother of two, it was easy to believe in the mission of getting teams around a table to share a meal: if families that eat together, stick together, then of course this could apply to teams. Previously at HelloFresh, Kate championed the customer, making the case for long-term growth vs short term gain, working across the business functions to bring the customer to the forefront of company strategy. Before entering the food tech space, Kate worked for Google in the development and implementation of their go-to-market strategies as well as their sales processes and discipline across Asia Pacific. Prior to Google, she was at McKinsey in London focusing on multi-channel strategy and digital transformations for retail and travel clients as they adapted to the evolving digital landscape. She helped clients respond to their new and constantly changing customer journeys as well as identify the back-end requirements needed to support the new digital capabilities. A digital strategist who has lived and worked across the globe from Hong Kong to Paris, Kate is passionate about developing women in the workplace and supporting them up the ladder. She also is dedicated to improving diversity in tech, working towards developing and retaining diverse talent in the fast growth, start-up world.
From her first technology role (as Windows 95 Champion back in 1997), she knew she enjoyed transforming the way we work through technology. After 10 years of tax consulting, she became a Purple Person in 2010 and hasn’t looked back since! Now a Director at Deloitte, Alison specialises in building technology solutions for Deloitte’s Tax & Legal services both here in the UK and Globally. A winner of the TechWomen100 Award, Alison has been actively involved in initiatives to attract and retain female talent and sees the benefit of diverse teams every day.
Frankie is a Director at Deloitte building and delivering technology solutions to clients. She is passionate about gaining and retaining women in the technology workforce and considers herself proudly as a purple person. Over the last 9 years, she’s grappled with the concept of purple people in professional services industry and looks forward to sharing her learnings and war stories with you.
Devon Edwards Joseph is a Data Engineer supporting the success of Data Science projects. Transitioning into data from a non-traditional background, Devon is passionate about mentoring and supporting others to switch into the field and thrive. In 2019, she sat on the Young Professionals’ Board of the UK WISE Campaign for gender parity in STEM fields, and is currently a Co-Organiser of the 700 member-strong London Artificial Intelligence Club for Gender Minorities. In 2019, Devon was pleased to have been shortlisted for Woman of the Year by the Women in IT Excellence Awards, and was named on the Computing.com 2019 Most Influential Women in UK Tech list.
Contemporary art technician and mental health advocate Alexandra has been a key player in Vodafone UK’s #Reinvent initiative since her debut as a professional software developer in 2018. She was nominated for the Makers & ComputerWeekly Women in Software Power List 2019, and is valued for her technical solutions, ownership, and quest for fairness for all in the workplace.
Having had her first encounter with informatics in high-school she is one of many who's spark for tech was doused by dry tutoring and dull subject matter. Having reignited that spark through self-tutelage, she now enjoys teaching and inspiring eager young minds at Code Like A Girl. She is involved in several tech and health programs/hackathons in the capacity of speaker, organiser, contender and attendee.
Alexandra holds a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Media Practice, having worked with film, photography and set design, for which she built a three room installation in her final project. Her other passions include music, dance, design, and Bubu, her big fluffy cat.
Sinéad O’Brien is a Lead Project Manager at the BBC. In her role in Design and Engineering, she has become a champion for responsible and ethical machine learning. This includes raising awareness of ML practices right across the BBC – and not just amongst the techie community. Sinéad’s background is in broadcast, telecoms and media. She recently completed a Masters in Digital Cultures.
Marja founded Jump in 2016, based on the belief that every person is unique and job matches should be too. Jump is the world’s first conversational job platform and personalises the job hunt for professionals through AI and behavioural data. Working with some of the top law firms in the UK, Jump is rapidly expanding to make the technology available to all people in the UK and beyond.
Clare Sudbery is a lead engineer with Made Tech ( https://www.madetech.com/). She is a maths graduate with 20 years of software engineering experience. She has a particular interest in teaching and mentoring; encouraging women into IT; and banishing impostor syndrome.
Nine years ago she returned to IT with a sigh of relief after a few years 'break' as a secondary school maths teacher. Since then she has embraced all things XP. She is on a mission to awaken the inner geek in clever women (and men) everywhere.
Clare is a published novelist, and blogs at https://medium.com/a-woman-in-technology and https://insimpleterms.blog/. She loves her job.
Karen has brought agile and microservices transformation and delivery to organisations across the public sector, FinTech and publishing industry. Karen is passionate about the intersection between tech, people and leadership and believes in building a successful team synergy you need a group of talented, diverse individuals who always try to raise their peers.
Tosca Colangeli is the General Manager of IBM’s Global Cloud and Technology Platform Services in the UK and Ireland.
In this role Tosca is responsible for the day-to-day running of this large organization which runs the architecture and platform transformation of Foundational Services that Clients rely on to deliver operation excellence and business value. This continues on from Tosca’s extensive leadership experience; including international assignments leading IBM’s Infrastructure Services and Application Service Provision solutions into Global Financial Markets Clients as well as running Systems Hardware Group in the UKI, focused on driving strategic change and transformation; as well as building new markets such as Cloud and Analytics.
Tosca is a passionate about building high performing, engaged teams and developing skills than create a platform to reach high potential whilst meeting the ever-changing demands of the technology industry. Tosca is a champion of Diversity and Inclusion within IBM and across the industry, supporting the LGBT Community through her role as the IBM UK Executive Straight Ally; sponsoring Pride, providing reverse mentorship and ensuring the community has visibility within the organization in addition to raising awareness of, and supporting mental health in the workplace.
Joanne currently head up the GIS Vendor Management team at Computacenter. Previously, she worked as a Lead Vendor Manager at Thomson Reuters. With over 15 years of experience within the Tech industry, from manging Suppliers, to Asset Management, including setting up new systems, tools & process, which delivered savings from a spend & process perspective.
Over the last 4 years, she has had an excellent with my BSI 27001 audit results. She also runs her own online forum for supporting & encouraging Women in Tech & looking at how we can deliver a truly diverse workplace.
Susie qualified as a Performance Coach in 2006, to enhance her skills as an award-winning leader of global product development; connecting her natural style in energising people to take action, with her empathy. Realising it was OK to be herself in leadership, she set about helping other high performers to get clarity, and engage support, such that their fulfilment furthered their careers.
Nothing gets past Susie - she sees all your brilliance, and will call out limiting behaviour so you surrender chuckling. Susie is an articulate and empowering speaker, who brings laser focus and an enormous heart to sustainable growth.
Her speciality is inspiring you to believe what’s possible, whilst guiding you to grow in confidence, and cheering you on. Helena emphasises the importance of one small step at a time and always looking for the good and positivity in everything. Progress is key!
Whether you’re transitioning into a new role, making the move from employee to entrepreneur, returning to work after a period of time out or trying to regain and grow in confidence, Helena is the one for you.
With a career in HR & Change Management Leadership roles over 20+ years cross sectors, Helena is well versed in life in the corporate world. Today, she coaches women via her ‘Grow in Confidence’ program, speaks on related topics and provides Change Management services to organisations.
Tracey is the Clinical Technology Director at the Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust. Tracey has worked in healthcare for 30 years, starting her career as a Radiographer. In 2017 she changed roles in clinical leadership to a technology role within the IT division. This career change led to a steep learning curve within the IT environment involving the management of two critical patient information systems, procurement of an enterprise system and accountability for all medical devices used in the trust. From this position Tracey is leading a Women In Technology Initiative WITI to support three objectives for junior and clinical women working in or with technology, these include: mentoring & coaching, professional & personal development and an informal forum to network. Her aim is to increase career opportunities into senior management and help to reduce inherent invisible barriers both individual and organisational through creating a more inclusive environment.
Helen Kuroczycki is the Software Development Manager at IDBS, who produce cloud-based solutions for global R&D organisations.
She started out studying Microbiology but found herself constantly criticising the scientific software she used. Thinking she could “do a better job of it”, she joined IDBS as a Software Tester. Her passion for software, its development processes and the people involved in it, took her through a variety of roles leading to her current position.
She might be a Manager by day, but she bakes and decorates biscuits by night. Most of them ending up in a school bake sale or company bake-off competition.
Currently working as a Scrum Master in the Agile transformation team in Bristol, Angharad injects a holistic approach into her role by also ensuring a focus on team wellbeing. She started her career teaching Philosophy at the University of Nottingham after obtaining a BSc and MA in Philosophy and Free Will. As a tutor, she used media and hands on activities to engage her students. Angharad has also worked in training and leadership positions for Lush, Santa’s Grotto, and LEGO before moving to with this wide range of experience, she brings her caring nature and fun flair into the Agile community.
Becky is a developer at BBC News Visual Journalism. She wrangles data and tinkers with code to create engaging, interactive projects for news articles.
Becky is passionate about combining modern code and empathy to create truly inclusive web content. She believes considering accessibility, internationalisation and non-javascript experiences are key to making the web a better place for humankind.
Outside of work, she can often be found gallivanting around in fancy dress, hitting a large drum (occasionally in time) with other obscurely dressed drummers.
Aurelia works as an Application Change Manager within the CTO organization of the Bank of America Merrill Lynch office in Dublin. She holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Ghana where she was also a keen member of the debate club and represented Ghana and the University at the 2016 World Universities Debate Championship in the Hague Netherlands as well as the 2015 Pan African Debate Championship in South Africa.
She is the founder of Pitch Hub, a social enterprise that focuses on equipping entrepreneurs with skills necessary to raise funds for their business. Pitch Hub has supported over 300 entrepreneurs in Ghana, Senegal and Ethiopia and has together with partners helped raise over $200,000 for the businesses.
She has always lent her voice and strength to initiatives that empower women and young people and this led to her being selected among 9 other young people for the 2018 Cohort of the Young Diplomats of Ghana, to represent the Ghanaian youth at both national and international stages. Due to her work, she has been invited to speak on various platforms, including the 2018 Global Youth Forum hosted in Paris where she spoke about the start-up ecosystem in Ghana and the 2018 Women Arise Summit.
Aurelia is a social activist and an entrepreneur who seeks to transform Africa and the world.
Anne is an Associate in the Commercial team and Co-Leads the Blockchain Group at Mishcon de Reya.
Anne founded and leads a sub-working group of Tech London Advocates Blockchain which focuses on Legal & Regulatory matters. This group is supported by the Law Society and is comprised of lawyers working together to come up with consistent definitions and standards to be adopted by lawyers in respect of blockchain technology and produce best practice guidelines for lawyers to follow when dealing with agreements partially or fully written in code. She has a diploma in Fintech from the Säid Business School, University of Oxford and was recognised as one of the most influential women in technology in Computer Weekly.
Anne enjoys working with entrepreneurial clients, particularly when assisting them with early stage fundraisings and the legal and commercial issues affecting start-up companies. Anne has mentored a number of early stage businesses through various incubator programmes, including MdR Lab. Anne also sits on the M:Tech panel, responsible for overseeing the firm's M:Tech initiative.
Anne has featured in the national press, commenting on key legal issues for game developers to consider in respect of their products and regularly writes for various journals including the Interactive Entertainment Law Review Journal and Computers & Law.
In 2019, Anne was highlighted as a Rising Star in Legal 500.
Erin is an Agile Coach at Tide Bank. Her career has seen her go from law graduate, to the John Lewis IT scheme, to consulting with PA Consulting and now playing in the world of Fintechs and startups. Despite considering herself to be "non techie", Erin found herself in a world of infrastructure, APIs and firewalls. There she found her niche in organisational culture, and has often been branded the early adopter of new ideas and techniques. Outside of work, she mentors girls and women on confidence and coaches public speaking.
Deborah is a comparison site expert with 15 years of experience in technology and finance.
Working across the private sector for MoneySuperMarket.com, Dixons Carphone, lastminute.com and Zuto, and launching a start-up telco/finance company has allowed Deborah to hone expertise in growing brands, financial planning, product expansion and strategic direction.
A regular face in the national press, providing expert comment for The Times, Express and Independent, among others, also producing thought leadership features on personal finance topics, for example women in finance, Brexit, budgeting, energy prices and more.
Deborah is an England Athletics endurance coach and a visually impaired guide runner.
Lynn Collier is Worldwide Program Director, Customer Success at Hitachi Vantara.
Customer Success is integral to the business, spanning Sales and Services and is focused on ensuring Customers derive the full value and business benefit from the portfolio delivered by Hitachi.
Lynn has been with Hitachi for 15 years, prior roles include; UK Chief Operations Officer, EMEA Strategic Solutions Director and EMEA Software Director.
She established an EMEA Employee Resource Group, spanning multiple Hitachi Group companies, to drive increased Diversity & Inclusion across various operating company initiatives and the EMEA Women of Hitachi Summit is now in its 7th year.
Katie went from grad engineer to a budding technical lead in 18 months. She is the go-to person in the Internal Products team and beyond, for skills like load testing large-scale production javascript applications. She is a mentor and a technical lead to the FT’s new engineering staff. Katie founded and led the FT’s first Junior Squad, a group dedicated to supporting 10% engineering time, the success of which was then replicated across multiple teams in our global org, including their new Sofia headquarters. Katie has also blogged about load testing and has spoken internationally at conferences. Katie's first project was called the GDPR hub, which is a system to support FT’s compliance team in modernizing how they deal incoming with data requests. She has also recently been listed by Computer Weekly as one of the top 200 most influential women in UK tech.
A skilled ISTQB Certified Test Manager with over 15 years’ experience of working in a test environment, 10 years in Agile environments.
She holds a BSc and a Certificate in Information Technology and Computing. She is enthusiastic, with a positive approach and am currently working as test manager on one of the largest projects within Brewin Dolphin.
As well as this, she has been working as a Corporate Responsibility Ambassador for Technology, encouraging staff to get involved in charitable events and using their volunteer days. She was awarded Star Team Member for her contribution to the CHUF Charity Champions Challenge.
Tanda holds a BSc in Computer Science and Multimedia and a MSc in Computing and Internet Systems. She started her career on ASOS's first Software Engineering Graduate Scheme and has continued to build her career at ASOS as an Associate Software Engineer. She is driven to encourage current and next generation of women in tech to push beyond their comfort zone and take every opportunity. Twitter @hellotanda
Mrudula takes great pride in being a silicon engineer and remains humbled by her small role in realising products that have reorganised and reshaped our world over the last two decades.
She launched her career at ARM. Her most notable achievement during this time was validating a core architecture that went on to power the first iPhone and many others thereafter.
Lured by experimental technology and a drive to experience the full lifecycle of a silicon device, she soon embraced startups. At PicoChip, she contributed to the creation of silicon technology that would revolutionalise 3G mobile connectivity, enabling wireless everywhere for everyone. At XMOS, she helped produce the chip, which today enables Amazon’s Alexa to follow your voice.
Currently, she leads the Graphcore Silicon Design team, focusing on the compute core of the IPU, their innovative AI processor.
Kayla Shapiro is a Site Reliability Engineering approach at the BBC for the previous two years. Based in London, Kayla enjoys living Californian stereotypes such as hiking and doing yoga at the mountaintop.
Alessia Amitrano is a non-binary front-end developer. They studied Foreign Languages at the University of Bologna before starting a career as a full-stack .NET web developer in Italy. They moved to London two years ago and decided to switch to pure front-end, specialising in Angular applications and animations. Currently a developer at Imagination, Alessia developed and personally installed applications in Dubai's Mall of Emirates, where they are still on display. They advocate LGBT rights and queer visibility on the workplace and love playing Dungeons and Dragons.
Ellena Ophira is a successful entrepreneur and CEO/Founder of Weddingly, a dynamic B2B2C platform that makes wedding planning more social, personal and intuitive.
As pioneers in WedTech, Ellena and her women-led team are on a mission to bring innovative Technology to the dated Wedding Industry.
With over 10 years experience in Marketing and Strategy, Ellena has worked with leading Brands such as John Lewis, LK Bennett and M&S, as well as supporting the launch and growth of over 200 Startups and SMEs.
Ellena started her first business in her early twenties and is a passionate advocate for entrepreneurship in Women.
She is also proud to be featuring in a new book, celebrating Female Founders, alongside inspirational women such as Martha Lane Fox.
Since running the school shop at 14, Jo has been a serial entrepreneur. Her passion for great customer service led to Bubbl, a new award winning mobile customer engagement tool that is disrupting the world of mobile advertising and marketing. This groundbreaking technology supercharges existing mobile apps with geolocation and rich media location-based content.
Her business development and management credentials come from a long career as an innovation consultant to technology start ups, and as a PR and marketing expert across multiple brands. She is also passionate about leading with heart which reflects the company culture that emanates from Bubbl.
Sheena Shah is the Founder of ElevatHer; A networking app empowering women. Sheena graduated from Aston University with a degree in Business and International Relations. Before founding ElevatHer, she spent almost 10 years in the financial services – starting her career on the graduate scheme for Goldman Sachs, she then moved to Morgan Stanley’s Sydney office and most recently worked for a proprietary trading firm Maven. Sheena decided to leverage her financial acumen with her passion of philanthropy to make a career transition and focus her efforts and impacts on empowering and supporting woman in finance through the launch of ElevatHer.
Natalie Gray is Head of Business Development at Voxgig, a global event tech SaaS startup. Before this was instrumental in the launch and growth of Skills Matter and CodeNode - Europe’s largest tech events space and community. More recently, Natalie co-founded the Eventprofs Dublin and Eventprofs London meetups and is a content curator, panel member and MC for these events. As a working Mum to two school-age children, Natalie is a passionate advocate for flexible working and diversity & inclusion in tech. She is an active moderator and team leader for the Tech Talent Charter and regularly attends and writes reviews of tech and D&I events she has attended which have been widely shared in the community.
Ramla Anshur is a Technology Delivery Analyst at Accenture. Having graduated in 2019 with a BSc (Hons) in Biomedical Sciences at Brunel University, she is passionate about all things digital health and emerging technologies. Outside of her work, she enjoys networking with like minded people and mentoring her peers through BAME initiatives. Ramla enjoys cooking a range of cuisines and is a huge foodie!
Sarah is currently Group Head Business Continuity & Crisis Management, at the London Stock Exchange Group. She is an energetic and tenacious leader with over 20 years’ experience delivering large scale business & ICT continuity, cyber security and resilience programmes and speaks passionately about the importance of the integrity, trust and ethics.
Sarah was named 2019 Women in IT finalist ‘Business Role Model of the Year’, Computerweekly longlist ‘Most influential women in UK tech’, Professional Security Magazine finalist ‘Contribution to Industry’ and most recently was awarded ‘PrivSec200’, recognising 200 people contributing to security and privacy sectors across Europe.
Nathalie is one of a small but growing contingent of women over the age of 40, who've made significant career changes to break into the UK tech industry.
With a background in graphics, she undertook a self-directed learning path to master building websites. In 2015 Nathalie co-founded a food-tech startup and undertook the Google Campus for Mums Startup Programme. Her next move was a full-stack coding Bootcamp with Le Wagon London in 2016. She secured a developer job at the start of 2018, her first 'employed' position in 22 years, making her a firm advocate for women returners into tech.
Margaret Sherer is the founder of Cittadina Marketing, the one stop shop for digital marketing. Cittadina Marketing delivers every part of the digital marketing process from strategy through to analytics supporting clients from startups to enterprises. They practice a traditional marketing approach, activated in a modern digital environment saving clients time through efficient marketing execution. Before founding Cittadina, Margaret worked at Microsoft and Google and holds an MBA from Cranfield School of Management. She has guest lectured at Cranfield, University of Greenwich, University of Westminster and University of Surrey. In her down time, she’s an avid reader, traveller, and consumer of great food and the arts.
Rubi Kaur is a Senior Solutions Architect at Vodafone Group for Enterprise new Product Development. With over 20 years of managerial and technical lead experience from previous roles at BT, O2 and the UK Government, Rubi has led award winning teams to win the Business Green IT Team of the year and the Government Finance Award for Sustainability. She is fellow of the British Computer Society, Chartered Institute for IT and committee member of BCSWomen and where she works to ensure “IT is good for Society” and we design and build responsible Tech. Rubi is passionate to encourage a progressive, diverse and inclusive IT profession where everyone is empowered and included in our digital world.
Claire Koryczan comes from a background in technology, creativity and psychology. As a life-longer learner, since her early teenage years, she has been on a quest to understand humanity, most recently qualifying as a practitioner in neuroscience in leadership.
In April 2019, Claire founded her first company; Beyond A tech advisory business for the Boardroom, helping peers to imagine new possibilities with technology. Prior to this, Claire’s career spanned startups, tech, brand consultancies, and creative agencies.
Claire is a passionate advocate for Women in Tech, mentoring and coaching MBA students at London Business School and across the Bloom creative network.
Throughout Claire’s career, she's has had the privilege to work with world-leading organisations and experience first-hand the impact of technology on people and business in an ever-changing world.
Joanne Montague is the COO of Weddingly, a dynamic B2B2C platform that makes wedding planning more social, personal and intuitive. As the pioneering team in WedTech, Jo works alongside Ellena Ophira, the Founder and CEO of Weddingly, and the rest of their female-led team to bring innovative technology to the dated Wedding Industry. She has had an award-winning sales and customer service career to date, and since joining Weddingly in 2017 as Head of Sales, she was offered the opportunity to put her passion for success through driving processes to good use by becoming the COO in 2018.
Jo is passionate about using Technology to provide quality resources, key information, education and training to an underrepresented industry. In work and at home, Jo is passionate about intersectional diversity and strongly believes in living inclusively, and demonstrating these beliefs in all aspects of work, life and balance.
Debbie Levitt, CEO of Delta CX, has been a CX and UX strategist, designer, and trainer since the 1990s. As a “serial contractor” who lived in the Bay Area for most of this decade, Debbie has influenced interfaces at Sony, Wells Fargo, Constant Contact, Macys.com, Oracle, and a variety of Silicon Valley startups. Clients have given her the nickname, “Mary Poppins,” because she flies in, improves everything she can, sings a few songs, and flies away to her next adventure.
Anya is the co-founder of Syrona Women, a leading digital health startup looking to democratise women's health. She previously worked in lifescience venture capital as one of the very few female investors in deeptech businesses. Prior to that, she worked at Goldman Sachs in London and also for the Investment Banking arm of the European Union in Luxembourg. She is an alum of Cambridge and Oxford University. She advocates for diversity in entrepreneurship and is passionate about mentoring female students to take up STEM subjects.
Ella works as a Scrum Master/Developer, leading a cross functional development team at one of the UK’s fastest growing startups. Since joining Bloom & Wild, Ella’s taken ownership of improving process, including moving to a daily release cycle, creation of a documentation wiki and code quality standardisation.
A member of Computer Weekly’s Women in Software Power List, Ella is passionate about encouraging women to join the tech industry. Her commitment to this includes getting primary school kids coding with Scratch, co-organising London’s largest monthly Ruby meet-up, coaching at Rails Girls London and Code First Girls and regularly sitting on panels for Stemettes, Makers and Goldsmiths University.
20 years international business experience in Supply Chain and Change Management. Progressed to coaching to create more impact in the world. Takes the “hard” out of leadership, and brings humour and humanity back into business. Described as a master of “Iron fist with velvet glove”. Calls you forth to play bigger. Creative, persistent, articulate. Chooses transformation over slogging it out.
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