Adam Ward is the Head of Recruiting of Pinterest overseeing University, Executive, Tech and Business Recruiting. Over the last 4 years, he’s helped scale Pinterest from 250 to 1500+ employees worldwide.
Prior to Pinterest, Adam spent 3 years at Facebook where he was a Director of Recruiting overseeing global University Recruiting and Recruiting Operations. He built a team and program that ramped to over 400 technical new grads and 900 intern hires per year.
Prior to joining Facebook, Adam spent 7 years at Qualcomm as a Director of Staffing where his responsibilities responsibilities included Head of APAC recruiting, Global Campus Recruiting, Recruiting Brand, and HR Data Analytics.
Adam started his career as an intern and then eventually the Campus Recruiting Manager for Trilogy Software in Austin, TX and later in Bangalore, India. He also served as a Marketing Manager years with the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin and was a founding member of CollegeHire.com.
Adam graduated from Wake Forest University with a degree in Communications and Psychology. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife and three daughters.
Mary Kate McHugh is a University Programs Specialist at Google. Her job is to connect undergraduate students with non-technical opportunities at Google. It is her dream job! Her biggest focus is to encourage students who are from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds in the tech world to find an interest in potentially working in that world someday. She's been at Google for 7 years and has done a variety of different roles including customer service, sales, training, and managing. On a personal note, she just moved to Chicago to be closer to her new nephew, Finnegan.
As a senior executive at the Anita Borg Institute (ABI), Elizabeth is an advocate for advancing women in technical roles in industry and academia. She is responsible ABI’s global communities of women technologists and programs for organizations focused on improving their diversity and inclusion. In addition, she leads the strategy, alliances and marketing teams. Prior to ABI, she held management positions in marketing and strategy at Apple, Verifone, Netcentives, Vontu, Certive, Plastic Logic, and RETHINK Partners, where she was Founder and CEO. Elizabeth received her BFA from the Hartford Art School and her MBA from the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University.
Noah Diffenbaugh is the Kara J Foundation Professor and Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow at Stanford University. He teaches classes at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Undergraduate classes include “The Global Warming Paradox”, and first-year Introductory Seminar, and “Climate and Society”, an overview course that draws students from across campus.
He is currently a member of the Climate Safe Infrastructure Working Group for the State of California, and has provided scientific expertise to the White House, the Governor of California, and U.S. Congressional offices. He has spoken at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Milken Global Summit, and the Commonwealth Club of California, and his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Wired Magazine.
Sarah is an innovative and respected Talent Acquisition leader with a passion for building sustainable and scalable global internship and early talent programs. As the founder and global manager of SAP’s world-class internship program, iXp, Sarah leads a team of program managers who deliver a stellar experience for all involved. Sarah is a strategic business partner to executive stakeholders, an advocate for early talent in the workplace, and visionary for the future workforce. When not in an airport or traveling the world, Sarah can be found outdoors hiking, running or chasing the snow for the perfect day on the mountain.
Ahmad is an Assistant Dean and Associate Director with BEAM, Stanford Career Education. In his role with Career Catalyst, a team focused on a two pronged approach of increasing Equity and Inclusion, and building Community and Belonging around the intersection of career and identity, Ahmad is responsible for the development and implementation of the broader diversity strategy for his team and BEAM. Ahmad’s professional experience includes a combined 12 years of work in higher education and the recruiting industry. Prior to his time at Stanford, Ahmad spent 6 years in academic advising at his alma mater UC Berkeley, where he earned his M.A. in Education and B.A. in Sociology.
Garrett Lord is the co-founder and CEO of Handshake, the leading college-to-career network helping today's students launch meaningful careers. Handshake aims to democratize opportunity for all students - no matter where they go to school, what they major in, or who they know. While a student at Michigan Tech, Garrett gained experience at both Los Alamos National Labs and Palantir. In 2014, Garrett and his fellow classmates launched Handshake. Today, the Handshake community helps 10 million students and young alumni from 700+ universities connect with 250,000 employers nationwide - including 100% of Fortune 500. Garrett is a Detroit area native and current San Francisco resident.
Liz Wessel is the Co-Founder and CEO of WayUp, the go-to platform for millions of early-career professionals to explore opportunities, receive advice, and get discovered by employers. Liz has been featured as one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 and named one of the 18 Coolest Women in Silicon Valley.
Tina Randhawa comes from a broad HR background having worked not only for a professional services company (Deloitte) as a Human Capital consultant but also as an HR manager supporting very large engineering & sales teams (Cisco). She made the transition to University Recruiting in 2011 and has never looked back. She's served as a campus manager, university program manager & team lead @ Cisco Systems for a very large scale UR program. In her next role, she took on Global University Relations responsibility for Symantec, which was ownership of the entire UR lifecycle. Her current role expands her team size but focuses primarily on the recruiting and campus experience for EA. Her team @ EA is responsible for all North America university hiring. Additionally, Tina has experience managing teams that are dispersed throughout North America as well as teams that are co-located.
Radhika Rangarajan is the Director and Engineering Manager for Big Data Technologies at Intel and WiBD founding lead Radhika earned her B.S. in Computer Science Engineering at Vellore Institute of Technology and later an M.S., Computer Science at Texas Tech University. Since graduating, Radhika has built an exciting career at Intel starting as a Sr. Software Engineer and now diving into the world of big data as a Sr. Engineering Program Manager for Big Data Technologies. Radhika co-founded Women in Big Data with a colleague at Intel in the summer of 2015 and since served as a training committee lead as well as welcomed a global following.
Tim brings over 6 years of university experience from Asana, Facebook, and Venmo. He is also a founding organizer of the O4U Tech, a conference that helps bring LGBTQ students from across the country to connect with tech companies to discuss and learn how about various topics in the industry and bring their full authentic selves to work.
Alexandria Noel Butler, affectionately known as Lexi B, is a project manager at Airbnb. She works on cross functional initiatives in finance, compliance and legal. Lexi B wears many hats including entrepreneur, speaker, editor, and writer.
As the founder of Grown Up Truth, a platform to discuss the professional and personal experiences of millennials, she has created a destination for candid conversations and opinions about navigating adulthood. The site has grown to 10,000+ subscribers and 12,000+ monthly hits. Lexi’s diverse writing audience includes Levo League, For Women to Women, and Rebel Magazine. In April 2017, Lexi B founded the Sista Circle: Black Women in Tech group to connect Black women with their tech peers around the world. With over 1,200 members, the group has become a strategic partner with many underrepresented business and online campaigns to bring awareness to diversity and women's empowerment.
Raised in St. Louis, MO, Lexi B graduated from Stanford University in 2011 with majors in Communication and Spanish. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her puppy, Duke.
Jennifer Kim was most recently Head of Employee Experience & Development at Lever, a recruiting software startup. Lever was able to reach a rare milestone in Silicon Valley, a 50:50 gender balance across the company by prioritizing diversity efforts from early on, and focusing on recruiting & culture efforts that were rooted in authenticity and originality. Jen co-founded Lever's D&I Taskforce when the company was just 10 employees, and guided the strategy for 3.5 years until the company reached 130. In 3.5 years at Lever, she held various roles in Product, Customer Success, Recruiting, and HR. Prior to that, she recruited for a education reform startup and provided career advice to MBAs at Stanford Business School.
Trained as a graphic designer, Bernard co-founded Wall-to-Wall Studios in Pittsburgh, PA in 1992 and returned home to launch the second office in Honolulu in 2005.
The agency (walltowall.com) specializes in growing brands through an integrated approach to design, advertising, online and environmental experiences, collaborating with local and national clients in the arts, education, hospitality, real estate, development, retail and technology. Wall-to-Wall Studios has long been known for its approach to using humor, wit and emotion to forge connections between a brand and their audience.
Bernard has been actively involved with the AIGA, the professional association for design as past President of both Pittsburgh and Honolulu chapters. He has taught communication/graphic design as an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon, Chaminade University of Honolulu and as a visiting professor at the St. Gallen School of Design in Switzerland.
In 2009, he was named “Advertising Man of Year” by the American Advertising Federation (AAF) of Hawaii. He spends most mornings thinking about lunch.
Nadia Abouzaid works in talent management at Jopwell and was previously a vice president and head of banking analyst recruiting at Barclays Investment Bank in New York City. She holds a B.S.B.A in Human Resources and Marketing from Washington University in St. Louis and an M.S. in Human Resources Management from New York University.
An anthropologist at heart and a journalist by training, Miki Johnson brings over a decade of storytelling, marketing, and visual media experience to her work helping companies better communicate with candidates. In 2014, with her husband and photographer Jackson Solway, Miki founded Job Portraits, an SF-based employer branding agency that uses authentic storytelling to help startups build a long-term recruiting advantage. Since then, Job Portraits has helped 60+ high-growth startups increase candidate response rates, cut screening call times, and improve hiring team satisfaction. An experienced facilitator, Miki also hosts a monthly gathering of Bay Area Diversity & Inclusion leaders.
Frank Dawson is the Dean of Career Technical Education, and a former Professor and Chair of the Communication and Media Studies Department at Santa Monica College (SMC). Frank leads the development of credit/non-credit Career Technical Education certificate and degree programs, and contract education and international training activities that address the needs of global businesses and emerging industries.
Frank developed the curriculum and Associates degree for SMC’s Promo Pathway, a year-long training program in the area of marketing, on-air promotions, and creative services. Promo Pathway has been recognized by the Aspen Institute’s “Future Skills for America” initiative as a model for industry/education/community partnerships. He now serves as Project Director for SMC’s role in the LA HI-TECH Regional Consortia. The Consortia membership includes 8 Community Colleges and 30 High Schools, and is committed to launching Digital Media and Computer Science Career Pathways for High School students that will align directly with Community College Career Pathways. LA HI-TECH has been recognized by the Obama Administration’s “TechHire” initiative as one of the 21 City model Industry/Education partnerships that is addressing the nation’s critical Skills Gap shortage in the Technology sector.
Frank Dawson was born in New York City, and earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell University. He earned a Master of Science degree in Television and Radio from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, where he has been inducted into the school’s professional gallery of distinguished alumni.
Kimberly is responsible for supporting the implementation of an outreach strategy designed to significantly expand the career center’s employer relationships across several industry verticals, cultivating dynamic career networks and meaningful connections between students, alumni, employers and the University’s various stakeholder groups. She also coordinates the efforts of a cross-functional team working to source opportunities for students in industries of high interest by reviewing preference data and existing employer databases to identify gaps, research industry hiring trends and find recruiters and alumni champions within these areas.
Miranda is passionate about connecting people to their dream jobs. This desire motivated her professional work in both higher education and people operations. While working in technical recruiting at two of the Bay Area’s leading companies, she realized that engineering pipelines were severely lacking female candidates. As Director of Operations at Hackbright Academy, Miranda solves for this issue first-hand by building corporate partnerships to ensure women are getting hired in technical roles at top companies.
Saqi Mehta is passionate about all things education: specifically women in tech. She spent the past 5 years in the startup scene in Silicon Valley, leading the University Recruiting team at Square. She recently returned to higher education and is now Associate Director of Employer Outreach at Tufts University. Saqi serves on the board of National Tech Diversity Magazine and writes for the Huffington Post, Daily Muse and Blavity amongst contributions for other publications. Her proudest accomplishment to date is being Co-Founder of ReigningIt (https://medium.com/@
Moira brings to the Career Center nearly 10 years of experience working in career development in higher education, providing career counseling to students of all majors, as well as developing programs and events to facilitate professional development and connection to employers. In addition, Moira has extensive experience consulting with Silicon Valley employers on topics including on-campus recruitment, branding and internship development. Prior to her work in career development, Moira held a variety of human resources roles in both corporate and educational settings. Moira is passionate about preparing students for the world of work. Her inspiration for her work comes from creating programs and resources that generate moments of personal and professional discovery for students in their career journey. Moira has her BA degree in Psychology and an MA in Counseling Psychology with a Career Development Emphasis.
Kamrin Klauschie is an aspiring social entrepreneur working at the intersection of education, community, technology, and social impact. She is passionate about growth mindset, experiential education, and unleashing latent human potential. Currently, Kam is the Director of Partnerships at Learners Guild, an inclusive and accessible 8-month technical training program for aspiring software engineers in Oakland. Before the Guild, Kam was the Senior Career Developer at Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco, where she built community and awareness around apprenticeship programs for engineers from non-traditional educational backgrounds. In a past life, she supported Leila Janah, Founder, and CEO of Sama, a family of non-profits improving access to dignified work, critical medical care, and digital training for those who live on less than $1 a day. As the first Community Manager at AngelHack, she ran hundreds of hackathons across Asia and the Middle East. When she graduated from college, Kam lived in Hyderabad, India as an IDEX Fellow in Social Enterprise testing and evaluating the viability and impact of low-cost tablet technologies in low-income schools. She is a StartingBloc fellow and the co-founder of TEDxUCIrvine. She loves tomatoes, traveling, reading, writing, running, and a good game of soccer.
Tarsha McCormick is the Head of Diversity and Inclusion for ThoughtWorks North America. Tarsha joined ThoughtWorks in January of 1999 as a Recruiting Specialist when the company was a small startup with a group of less than 100. Today ThoughtWorks has grown to over 3500 employees globally in 34 offices spread across 13 countries on 6 continents.
She was instrumental in helping to build, grow, and lead various aspects of their People organization including recruiting, benefits, HR operations, and talent management. Since moving into the Head of Diversity and Inclusion role in January 2015, Tarsha is responsible for driving the strategic thinking and work related to making ThoughtWorks more diverse and inclusive, and advocating for change in the I.T. industry.
After earning a B.A. in Political Science from Illinois State University, Tarsha worked in the social services industry for 4 years before making a transition into human resources, which married her love of people, law, and education. In addition to her 18 years of human resources experience, she holds an MBA with a focus on Human Resources Management. Born and raised in Chicago, she has called Atlanta home since 2010.
Megan brings experience from public and private sectors prior to working in higher education. She most recently designed career programming via employer networking and coaching for over 3,000 College of Business students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, preparing them for positions in financial services, technology, consulting, and marketing. Prior to career services, Megan led the marketing, operations, and guest services teams of a joint venture between the University of Illinois and Fox-Atkins Development, LLC at the UI Research Park. She has also worked in the tech sector overseeing government accounts including NASA, the Department of Energy labs, U.S. Army, and the CDC. Megan earned her Ed.M. in Education Policy and B.S. in Management-Entrepreneurship from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Marlene has over 25 years of diverse higher education experience including a variety of roles in career development, experiential learning, and cooperative education. She received a BA from UC Davis and an MA in Higher Education Administration from Michigan State University. She has developed many programs and presented at numerous conferences representing her public and private university experiences. At BEAM, Stanford Career Education, she served as an Assistant Dean and Associate Director of Career Ventures. A few of the signature programs co-designed by Marlene at Stanford include the creation of a student-alumni mentoring program, the Stanford Immersion in Medicine Series Program and Shadowing Alumni in the Real World. She currently has 3 of her own in colleges around the globe and is always up for an adventure, especially those outdoors involving sunsets.
Hayley assists with the implementation of an outreach program designed to build relationships with employers and alumni and increase the number of opportunities for undergraduate and graduates across a wide range of industries and fields. She also contributes to assessment efforts, data compilation, and analysis to identify and report job market trends, outreach outcomes and impacts on student opportunities for internships and full-time employment.
Olivia Haas is currently enjoying her third career. As a creative director at Job Portraits, an SF-based employer branding agency, she uses authentic storytelling and the tools of journalism to help startups build a long-term recruiting advantage. Prior to Job Portraits, Olivia built and ran all university programs for Customer Experience Management (CEM) leader Medallia, traveling the country to (successfully!) translate the story of a B2B SaaS company for both technical and non-technical undergrad and grad students. And before tech? Olivia had a tell-all-worthy career in entertainment, first working on Broadway and then in film and television in Los Angeles. A playwright, actor, and improviser with a B.A. in English from Stanford, Olivia is more than qualified to discuss the experience of being a “fuzzy” in the tech world.
From East to West Coast and around the world, Syndhia forges and nurtures relationships with companies in the tech space connecting them with Columbia talent both on-campus and off. With a close ear to industry and identity-specific student groups, she coaches students through an ever-changing recruiting landscape. As a dedicated employer partner, Syndhia facilitates meaningful connections from large corporations to series A stage startups. Prior to her time at the Center for Career Education, Syndhia worked in the nonprofit and finance industry.
Kayleigh is a Technical University Recruiter at Lyft, primarily leading internship hiring within their Autonomous division. Over the last 7 months, she has helped scale Lyft's internship program across Software Engineering, Product Management, and Data Science. Prior to Lyft, she also contributed to University Recruiting efforts at Zynga and Safeway and built many partnerships with various campuses and student organizations. Originally from Alaska, she graduated from the University of Idaho with a degree in Management and Human Resources with the intention of breaking into the tech recruiting space.
Roselyn Byrd is a 1st-year graduate student, USC Marshall MS Business Analytics, and incoming WiBD Sol Cal lead. Rose earned a B.S., Economics from the University of Florida Cum Laude where she had two career-inspiring internships as a Business Analyst Intern for a biotech firm and later as an Economic Development Intern where she worked for the United Nations in Brazil.
April Zeng is a 2nd-year graduate student, USC Marshall MS Business Analytics, and co-founder of WiBD So Cal. April is a double Trojan having earned her B.S., Business Information Systems at the USC Marshall School of Business with a minor in Enterprise Information Systems from USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. April launched her career with KPMG as an SAP Security Consultant and later an Enterprise Performance Management/Analytics Consultant. She has also interned for Fiji Water and Sony Crackle.
Lily earned an MA in Student Counseling and later an MA in Education Leadership at Chapman University where she began her career in career services. Her most recent roles placed Lily in a position to cultivate networks for employer relations and career development partnerships. Lily joined the University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business in July, 2016 and co-founded the WiBD So Cal chapter in the summer of 2017. She primarily advises students to drive leadership activities and membership development as well as welcome new employers and professionals that would like to forge a greater relationship with WiBD and USC.
Dr. Sathya Narayanan is a professor of Computer Science at California State University Monterey Bay. He teaches freshman year seminar, Physics, proseminar and a senior capstone course for CS students. Apart from his teaching and day-to-day responsibilities, Sathya is working to develop and replicate a cohort-based bachelor's degree model build around learning communities of students to address capacity, quality and diversity challenges in CS education. CS++ is a cohort program geared towards incoming freshman students and CSin3 is a high quality, low cost, three-year bachelors program in computer science built in collaboration with Hartnell College. The cohort-based model was selected as one of the top tier innovative ideas in higher education by the state of CA. Sathya currently serves on the Computer Science Strategic Implementation Advisory Panel for the CA Department of Education.