Brenda Darden Wilkerson is an advocate for access, opportunity, and social justice for underrepresented communities in technology. She currently serves as the President and CEO of AnitaB.org, an organization working to shape public opinion about issues of critical importance to women technologists in academia, industry, and government. She founded the original Computer Science for All program, building computer science classes into the curriculum for every student in the Chicago Public Schools, and serving as the inspiration for the Obama administration’s national CS4All initiatives.

Sandy Carter is Vice President of Windows and Enterprise Workloads at Amazon Web Services (AWS) focused on helping companies to innovate using technology. Prior to joining AWS, Sandy spent a decade at IBM. She is the author of Extreme Innovation: Three Superpowers for Purpose and Profit, built on her research with Carnegie Mellon. Sandy was named Lifetime Achievement Winner, ‘Excellence in Cloud Achievement’ for 2018, Top 39 Engineers by Business Insider 2018, Top 50 AI influencer by Onalytica 2018, Most influential global marketing leader by World Marketing Congress 2018, Top 3 Innovation Influencer at SXSW in 2017, Top Digital Influencer in 2016 by Forbes, and Top 10 Women in Technology by CNN.

Sandy is the Chairman of the Board of Girls in Tech, and an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley. She was honored twice with the AIT United Nations Member of the Year award for helping developing countries with technology. She is also an advisor to startups in AI, IoT, and AR/VR.

Kathy Alexion serves as the Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

She officially started the role in January 2019 and was previously the Associate Chief Information Officer.

Since joining Fred Hutch in 2016, Alexion has helped lead the push to utilize cloud technology through a digital transformation to accelerate cancer research. As CIO, Alexion has full responsibility for all enterprise IT and information security, which covers a wide range of work including engineering and operations, enterprise applications and the Project Management Office.

Some of Alexion’s biggest accomplishments at the Hutch includes refreshing the entire tech infrastructure, migrating more than half of the center’s critical enterprise applications to the cloud and ensuring IT-managed data is securely backed up.

Alexion brings over 20 years of technology experience, having also worked at Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and JP Morgan Chase. She has a B.S. in math and computer science from the University of Colorado and an MBA in technology management from the University of Washington. She’s currently enrolled in the Carnegie Mellon University, Heinz College CIO Institute for Executive Education.

Laura is a cookie-baking machine and the Cat’s Pajamas as well as the first woman Technical Fellow at Microsoft. She started at Microsoft in 1989 as an intern and followed in the footsteps of other tech mavens by dropping out of Harvard. After shipping many versions of Windows and NetMeeting, she left Microsoft in 2000 in search of adventure.
Startups, cooking classes, circus acrobatics, house remodeling, mountain climbing, reading the complete trilogy of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, running marathons, and improv comedy are just a few of the things she tried.
All of those and more came in handy when she returned to Microsoft in the summer of 2009. She worked on Windows Phone for 3 years and led the team that created a buttery smooth User Interface, ported Direct X to the phone, and built the first Metro experience. For 2 years after that she was the Director of Development for Windows Phone CXE, the fast ship growth team. Among other things her team shipped the award-winning Lumia 1020 with the amazing 41 MP camera.
Laura took a quick side-trip to the cloud services side of the house in the fall of 2014 and learned a lot in One Drive Share Point. She returned to Windows in the spring of 2015 just in time to be eligible for the Windows 10 ship party. As Director of Engineering for Windows Fundamentals, she shipped 3 versions of Windows 10 while upping the FUN and lowering the MENTAL. In February 2017 she moved to OneNote. Today Laura is TF/CVP of Notes and Tasks.

As Redfin’s Chief Technology Officer, Bridget leads the software engineering team, which she has grown to more than 150 engineers in Seattle and San Francisco. Her mission is to build technology that makes the process of buying and selling a home less complicated and less stressful. She started coding when she was five on an Apple IIe, and has built software and led teams at high-growth tech companies for almost twenty years.

Bridget specializes in big data, analytics engineering, and systems architecture. She is a thought leader on engineering culture and issues facing women in technology, and nearly 32% of Redfin’s technology team are women. She holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Harvard University, where she graduated magna cum laude.

GeekWire’s Lisa Stiffler tells the stories of Northwest startups, profiles leaders in technology and covers the intersection of do-gooder causes and the tech sector, including social, environmental, health, philanthropy, diversity and education issues.

Lisa is a University of Washington alumna twice over, with a background in cell biology that was jettisoned for the excitement and nearly instant gratification of journalism. Her first media gig was at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer where for a decade she primarily covered environmental issues. More recently she has worked as a freelance reporter for the Seattle Times, features editor for Seattle’s Child parenting magazine, researcher at Sightline Institute, and reporting for national and local news sites.

Follow @lisa_stiffler and email lisa@geekwire.com.

Nicole Buchanan is the former Executive Director at Ada Developers Academy.

Nicole honed her leadership instincts over the past 23 years continually connecting, coaching, and creating opportunities to grow inclusive, diverse teams at Fortune 500 companies including Microsoft, AT&T, Motorola, and Ericsson.

She has been the driving force behind many tech industry firsts. Highlights include launching Motorola’s first world phone, taking the first wireless FedEx package tracking application to market, managing the first wireless Fidelity Investments 401K application, and the first Windows Mobile and BlackBerry Devices at AT&T Wireless.

Throughout her career, Nicole’s objectives have always run much deeper. She is passionate about increasing diversity in the industry with an emphasis on women and marginalized communities. She’s also a lifelong advocate within organizations, creating paths forward for companies to provide inclusive environments. Her ultimate goal is to establish equity for those who face barriers and roadblocks.

Nicole has been featured on King 5 TV, NPR, in the LA Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her recent roster of speaking engagements include Women in Tech Regatta 2018, New Tech NW – Women in Tech Leadership, Ascend Leadership Conference – Less Talk More Action panel, and Black Women in Tech 2018.

Nicole lives on the Eastside, with her husband and four boys, 12 and 7-year-old triplets.

Ambika Singh is revolutionizing the way women dress. A graduate of Dartmouth College and MIT’s Sloan School, Singh makes women’s lives a bit easier with her high-tech, high-touch company, Armoire, which offers a true “wardrobe as service” experience. Busy women need no longer waste hours scrolling through endless retail webpages, or feel their way through crammed racks of clothing. For a flat, monthly subscription fee, Armoire members gain access to an unlimited, curated online closet of high-end pieces taking its members from desk to dinner.

Passionate, upbeat, and success-driven, with fifteen years of experience in the tech industry, Singh has worked across diverse contexts in organizations both small and large, via roles in marketing, business development, product management, SEO, and social media. Singh played a key role in the creation of internet startups Rover.com and TravelPost.com, as well as two major Microsoft product launches: Internet Explorer 8 and Windows 7.

This year, Singh deservedly landed on the Puget Sound Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 list, was featured in The Seattle Times, and spoke at Amazon, Microsoft, American Express, Harvard Business School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the UW Foster School of Business.

Alice Steinglass is the president at Code.org. Her teams build the most popular computer science courses in America for students from kindergarten through high school. They run workshops and professional learning programs that have prepared tens of thousands of teachers across the United States to begin teaching computer science. In addition, her team partners with education and software companies across the industry to run the Hour of Code – a global movement reaching 10’s of millions of students in over 180 countries.

Alice is dedicated to increasing diversity in computer science by giving every student the opportunity to learn computer science in school. With a student base that is 45% female and 47% African American or Hispanic, Code.org has already enrolled millions of girls in our Computer Science classes.

Prior to Code.org, Alice studied computer science at Harvard and led various teams at Microsoft: she managed the PM team for the UX Platform on HoloLens, designed APIs and developer client libraries for Xbox 360, ran an ecosystem outreach and UX team for Windows and built project management tools.

Rebecca Norlander is the Global Head and Vice President of Software Engineering for HP’s Personal Systems business group. She has worldwide responsibility for the PS Software Strategy and the Software Engineering Center of Excellence, responsible for developing meaningful customer experiences that amaze across HP personal computing devices.

Prior to joining HP, Rebecca served as CEO of Samepage Health, a Seattle-based healthcare technology company. She previously spent nearly 20 years at Microsoft in several senior software leadership roles, including Technical Strategist to Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie and General Manager of Windows Security.

She has a passion for developing the next generation of female technical talent. Most notably she has led efforts to advance K-12 mathematics and science education and to address the underrepresentation of women in computer science. Her contributions include serving on the National Board of the American Association of University Women, Board of Advisors for the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, and many appearances as a keynote speaker and panelist at various conferences, including GHC. Rebecca has also served on the Board of Directors for the Technology Access Foundation, a Washington-state based non-profit focused on using Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math as tool to provide social change and educational equality for communities of color.

Rebecca holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Boston University (BU), where she received the 2015 Distinguished Alumna Award from the BU College of Arts and Sciences, the first woman to earn this distinction. She also received the 2008 Distinguished Alumna Award from the BU Computing Alumni Network. She is originally from Maryland and now lives in the Seattle, Washington area.

François Locoh-Donou is F5’s President, CEO, and a member of the Board of Directors. He joined F5 in 2017, bringing to the office nearly two decades of enterprise technology experience building a wide range of products, teams, and operations around the world.

Locoh-Donou previously held successive leadership positions at Ciena, the network strategy and technology company, including Chief Operating Officer; Senior Vice President, Global Products Group; VP and General Manager, EMEA; VP, International Sales; and VP, Marketing. Prior to joining Ciena, he held R&D roles at Photonetics, a French opto-electronics company.

Locoh-Donou serves on the advisory board of Jhpiego, a non-profit global health affiliate of Johns Hopkins University. He is also the co-founder of Cajou Espoir, a cashew-processing facility that employs several hundred people in rural Togo, 80 percent of whom are women. Cajou Espoir exports more than 400 tons of cashew kernels annually to the U.S. and Europe.

Cindy Alvarez is a principal PM Manager at Microsoft, helping internal teams get better at continuous learning, customer understanding, devops, and culture. She’s the author of Lean Customer Development: Build Products Your Customers Will Buy, and a frequent speaker on customer research, Lean Startup tactics, psychology, and experimentation tactics. Recently, she launched a membership-based community offering toolkits and curated advice and tactics for enterprise organizations working through innovation and change projects at http://www.cindyalvarez.com/foundry.

When she’s not thinking about the intersection of tech and teams, she enjoys running half-marathons, cooking, and parenting two small humans. You can follow her on Twitter at @cindyalvarez.

Amanda Casari is continuously fascinated by the intersection between humans and technology. She has worked in a breadth of cross-functional roles and engineering disciplines, including data science, machine learning, complex systems, and robotics. She experiments with projects and programs to make technology and machine learning more accessible, most recently co-authoring the O’Reilly book, “Feature Engineering for Machine Learning Principles and Techniques for Data Scientists.” Amanda focuses on growing and supporting developer communities with empathy as part of the Developer Relations team at Google Cloud.

Sheila Oh directs the Computer Science Fundamentals Certificate Program at Seattle University, a part-time career change program that prepares students with no prior computer science background to enter the MSCS program. Before moving into academia, Sheila spent time as a technology consultant, software engineering manager, and director of operations.

A founding community leader of Seattle AnitaB.org, which launched in June 2016, Sheila led the organization of 2017 Hopperx1 Seattle and monthly, local events for the Seattle AnitaB.org community. She is currently serving as the main organizer for 2019 Hopperx1 Seattle, a locally organized conference modeled after the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

In her “space time, she can be found in the violin section of the Seattle Philharmonic, kicking up her heels with Sister Kate Date Company, and serving on the board of Live Music Project.

Ross is the Director for Skype for Good at Microsoft.

Ross is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and blogger and author of The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention and holds seven U.S. patents.

Along with Sheila Oh, Ross is a leader of Seattle AnitaB.org and part of the planning for Hopperx1 Seattle in March 2019.

He has been a member of the Leadership Council for the Anita Borg Institute, co-chair for Grace Hopper Organizational Transformation track. and part of the gender partner LT and ”male ally” panel discussions at the IEEE Women in Technology and National Center for Women in Technology (NCWIT) Summit and TechCrunch. He works with iUrbanTeen and Native Americans at Microsoft.

Kiki is a Principal PM focusing on Data & Analytics for the Microsoft Education division, helping empower the students of tomorrow with technology solutions. She has worked in many leadership positions across Microsoft focusing on data and analytics and business strategy, including Xbox, Microsoft Services and Finance.

Prior to joining Microsoft, she held several data modeling and risk portfolio management positions in investment Banking in London, working for UBS Investment Bank.

She has been involved with AnitaB.org for over 7 years as a co-chair and reviewer of the GHC Data Science track, is co-chairing for GHC19 and is a core member of the AnitaB.org and Hopperx1 Seattle planning team.

She is a graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science and lives in Seattle with her husband and two boys.

Lilia Abaibourova is an experienced technical leader who enjoys building platforms and teams. As Director of Product Management with GoDaddy, she leads a team that defines the future of UX and Personalization Platform for the company’s web and native app presence.

In her previous role, Lilia was an Engineering Manager with HBO, leading their Streaming Services Platform team. Thanks to her team’s efforts, in 2015, 2016 and 2017, some of the most popular series ever produced such as Game of Thrones and True Detective were streamed by millions of customers without infamous outages and interruptions the platform was known to have in previous seasons.

Lilia started her career at Microsoft, where she honed her engineering and leadership skills while working on both, established products like SharePoint as well as cutting-edge incubations as part of Live Labs and Office Labs teams.

Lilia is passionate about diversity, having been a founding member of Women of HBO and Women of Office communities. She served as the General Co-Chair at the Grace Hopper Conference in 2014 and 2015. She is on the leadership team for the Hopperx1 Seattle event. Lilia also moderated and spoke on multiple panels at Grace Hopper and other events.

Lilia holds a Master’s in Computer Science from Colorado School of Mines. Outside of work she enjoys spending time with her family on local hiking trails, traveling and competing in triathlons.

Ronda joined Amazon in 2011 as part of Amazon’s Marketplace, also known as Seller Services. Ronda has worked in Marketplace, Executive Recruiting, AWS Security, and most recently, AWS Cryptography. Since 2018, Ronda has worked as a program manager within the AWS Cryptography team that builds tools to make it easy for AWS customers to encrypt their data in AWS. Prior to Amazon, Ronda worked in the public school system and owned her own business helping to pioneer the growth and evolution of the WA All-Star Cheer and Dance industry.

Namita, a Microsoft veteran, is a product leader with a strong pulse on building sticky consumer experiences. She has a deep passion for building products with customer centric mindset in agile and startup environments. Namita has led multiple products each targeting millions of customers spanning areas like Search, Maps, Windows and Developer Tools. She has cross-discipline expertise and has worked both in Engineering Manager and Product Management roles.

Namita is very passionate about growing women’s presence and reach in tech. She was one of the founding members of a cross organizational Women’s Leadership initiative at Microsoft. She has served as a panelist at several women-in-tech events at local schools and tech companies in the Seattle area. She has also been a long time mentor for Microsoft’s YouthSpark DigiGirlz program.

Namita has been on the founding committee for Seattle AnitaB.org chapter since June 2017. She was the Program Chair for 2017 Hopperx1 Seattle where she led a team that helped build the overall program for the conference and is currently serving as the Sponsorship Chair for 2019 Hopperx1 Seattle.

Audrey Van Belleghem serves as a Business Program Manager in Facebook’s Infrastructure group, managing the execution of complex, cross-functional operations programs. Previously Audrey was the Senior Vice President of Operations and the Grace Hopper Celebration at AnitaB.org, a non-profit organization supporting women in technology. Prior to joining AnitaB.org, Audrey was Chief of Staff to the Executive Vice President of Products at NetApp, a $6 billion Fortune 500 company providing innovative storage and data management solutions. Audrey has been named a Woman of Influence by the San Jose/Silicon Valley Business Journal and has been recognized by the U.S. Department of State as a Technical Mentor to women in the Middle East and North Africa. Audrey holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from UCLA, and a Masters of Business Administration from the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley.

Zontziry (“Z”) Johnson is a market research manager at Microsoft. Z is responsible for building and driving skill development for the Customer and Market Research team, as well as influencing the team culture to more readily embrace the changes that are coming with modernizing the insights function. Z is also the lead marketer for SnoCo Makerspace and serves on the Market Research Institute International board.

Katie van Zyl is a Senior Director of Product Management for the Customer Experience organization at GoDaddy, where her mission is to give entrepreneurs the tools and insights needed to start, grow, and thrive in their ventures. Prior to GoDaddy, Katie has spent 20+ years in the software industry leading product management teams across different products and platforms.

Katie is passionate about supporting women in tech, with a focus on the support and retention of senior women later in career. She is on the core team for the GoDaddy Women in Tech employee resource group, a corporate partner of ABI Seattle, and is a founding member of LevelUp Seattle, whose mission is to build an empowering community for mid-to-senior female technical leaders across the Greater Seattle Region. She has been a host and speaker at many local and industry events.

Outside of work Katie enjoys spending time with her husband and kids, playing volleyball, traveling, and trying new restaurants.

Alice Steinglass is the president at Code.org. Her teams build the most popular computer science courses in America for students from kindergarten through high school. They run workshops and professional learning programs that have prepared tens of thousands of teachers across the United States to begin teaching computer science. In addition, her team partners with education and software companies across the industry to run the Hour of Code – a global movement reaching 10’s of millions of students in over 180 countries.

Alice is dedicated to increasing diversity in computer science by giving every student the opportunity to learn computer science in school. With a student base that is 45% female and 47% African American or Hispanic, Code.org has already enrolled millions of girls in our Computer Science classes.

Prior to Code.org, Alice studied computer science at Harvard and led various teams at Microsoft: she managed the PM team for the UX Platform on HoloLens, designed APIs and developer client libraries for Xbox 360, ran an ecosystem outreach and UX team for Windows and built project management tools.

Debbie Dubrow is a Senior Engineering Manager at Zillow Group, where she leads both Product and Software Development for Zillow.com on-site marketing. At Zillow she is also the director of Women in Tech, a vibrant group that fosters inclusion and helps develop leadership skills amongst women in technical roles. Debbie previously worked at Microsoft where she was Group Program Manager in the windows user experience team.

Amy is a product leader with 8+ years experience managing digital products in the consumer technology space. Amy has been with HBO since August 2014 where she launched HBO NOW, enabling customers to subscribe to HBO without a cable package for the first time ever. Amy continues to lead HBO teams in the planning and delivery of world-ready features across the HBO digital products portfolio – HBO NOW, HBO GO, HBO.com, and related Cinemax products. Prior to HBO, Amy was with Nordstrom where she managed the digital product experience for Loyalty customers. Outside the office, Hebert is learning how to keep a houseful of plants thriving and how to mix a perfectly balanced old fashioned – mezcal cocktails, you’re next!

Jodie Draper is a Principal Data Science Lead, supporting EDU, OneNote, and several other products. She studied computer science at Purdue University (BS) and University of Illinois (M-CS). After 5 years working towards a PhD at the University of Illinois, she joined Microsoft as a Program Manager on the Word team. During that time, she discovered a love for using data to improve products and transitioned to a data science role after a few years. To aid the transition, Jodie earned a certificate in Data Science at University of Washington.

Jenn Lin is a Principal Engineer at Amazon Fashion. In this role, she acts as chief architect and is focused on building the next generation of shopping experiences. Jenn grows teams of developers who build new retail ecosystems in order to innovate on behalf of customers. Prior to Amazon, she was a technical leader at Panopto, Get Satisfaction, Microsoft, and IBM.

Rekha has over 20 years of industry experience spanning enterprise software development, IT projects and cloud computing. Currently she is building strategies for long term product growth, by developing and nurturing successful partnerships and sustainable engineering investments. She has led several teams at Microsoft and multi release products and enjoys using technology to solve challenging problems. Throughout her career, Rekha has been a passionate advocate for women in computing as a mentor, coach, contributing to community outreach programs and participating in local communities such as Hopperx1 Seattle. She is a volunteer for TEALS program, helping local high school students to achieve greater success in computer science. Her hobbies include reading, participating in hackathons, exploring cultures through travels and is always learning a new skill. Her current interest includes data science and statistical analysis. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Physics from India.