Austin Adams

Austin Adams retired in 2006 as Corporate Chief Information Officer of JPMorgan Chase, the 3rd largest bank holding company in the world.  He was responsible for technology and operations, managing almost 28,000 employees and a multi-billion dollar budget.  He assumed that role upon the merger of JPMorgan Chase and Bank One Corporation in July 2004.

A 35-year banking veteran, Adams spent most of his career overseeing technology and operations during dramatic consolidation in the industry. Prior to the JPMorgan Chase – Bank One merger, he was executive vice president and Chief Information Officer of Bank One.

Prior to joining Bank One in 2001, he was CIO at First Union Corporation, now Wells Fargo Corporation.

Adams became the head of technology and operations at First Union in 1985, following the merger with Northwestern Financial Corporation, which he joined in 1973.

In 2002, Business 2.0 magazine named him one of the 16 most influential technology people in the world.

He earned both a bachelor's degree in business administration and an M.B.A. from Appalachian State University.  He has been awarded Appalachian State’s Distinguished Alumnus award and is a member of ASU Athletic Hall of Fame.

Adams was recognized as the 2004 CIO of the Year by Waters magazine.

Adams presently serves on the board of directors on two public companies, Dun & Bradstreet and Spectra Energy. He serves as a board member of Union National Bank Holdings, a private equity owned bank. He is also a member of the board of trustees of Presbyterian College. Adams serves as a consultant to various financial services companies.

Joshua Aronson

Joshua Aronson has been studying stereotypes, self-esteem, motivation, and attitudes for the past 13 years. Most of his work seeks to understand and remediate race and gender gaps in educational achievement and standardized test performance.

Often, the low performance of blacks in particular, but other minorities as well, gets casually chalked up to genetic or cultural differences that supposedly block acquisition of skills or values necessary for academic achievement. In sharp contrast, Aronson and his students and colleagues have uncovered some exciting and encouraging answers to these old questions by looking at the psychology of stigma - the way human beings respond to negative stereotypes about their racial or gender group. What they have found suggests that being targeted by well-known cultural stereotypes ("men don't ask for directions," "girls can't do math," and so on) can be very threatening, a predicament his mentor and he called "Stereotype Threat."

Stereotype threat engenders a number of interesting psychological and physiological responses, many of which interfere with intellectual performance and academic motivation. Aronson has conducted numerous studies showing how stereotype threat depresses the standardized test performance of black, Latino, and female college students. These same studies showed how changing the testing situation (even subtly) to reduce stereotype threat, can dramatically improve standardized test scores. This work offers a far more optimistic view of race and gender gaps than the older theories that focused on poverty, culture, or genetic factors.

Aronson has found that we can do a lot to boost both achievement and the enjoyment of school by understanding and attending to these psychological processes, thereby unseating the power of stereotypes and prejudice to foil the academic aspirations of the young people who, just by virtue of being born black, brown, or female, are subjected to suspicions of inferiority.

Craig Barrett

Dr. Craig Barrett is a leading advocate for improving education in the U.S. and around the world. He is also a vocal spokesman for the value technology can provide in raising social and economic standards globally. In 2009, he stepped down as Chairman of the Board of Intel Corporation, a post he held from May 2005 to May 2009.

Craig Barrett was born in San Francisco, California. He attended Stanford University in Palo Alto, California from 1957 to 1964, receiving Bachelor of Science, Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in Materials Science. After graduation, he joined the faculty of Stanford University in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and remained through 1974, rising to the rank of Associate Professor. Dr. Barrett was a Fulbright Fellow at Danish Technical University in Denmark in 1972 and a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Physical Laboratory in England from 1964 to 1965. He is the author of over 40 technical papers dealing with the influence of microstructure on the properties of materials, and a textbook on materials science, Principles of Engineering Materials.

Dr. Barrett joined Intel Corporation in 1974 and held positions of vice president, senior vice president and executive vice president from 1984 to 1990. In 1992, he was elected to Intel Corporation's Board of Directors and was promoted to chief operating officer in 1993. Dr. Barrett became Intel's fourth president in 1997, chief executive officer in 1998 and chairman of the Board in 2005.

Dr. Barrett served until June 2009 as Chairman of the United Nations Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies and Development, which works to bring computers and other technology to developing parts of the world. He co-chairs Achieve, Inc., is vice chairman of the National Forest Foundation and Science Foundation Arizona, president and chairman of the BASIS Schools, Inc. Board of Directors, and a member of the Board of Directors of K12 Inc., Society for Science and the Public, Dossia and Grameen Intel Social Business. Dr. Barrett serves on the advisory board of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the Arizona Commerce Authority Board, the faculty of Thunderbird School of Global Management, and is Honorary Chairman of the Irish Technology Leadership Group. Dr. Barrett was appointed by the President of the U.S. as one of the private sector leaders of a national education science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) initiative now known as Change The Equation which he chairs, and he also was appointed by the President of the Russian Federation as the International co-chairman to lead the Board of the Fund for Development of the Center for Elaboration and Commercialization of New Technologies. Dr. Barrett has served on numerous boards, policy and government panels, and has been an appointee of the President's Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations and the American Health Information Community. He has co-chaired the Business Coalition for Student Achievement and the National Innovation Initiative Leadership Council, and has served as a member of the Board of Trustees for the U.S. Council for International Business and the Clinton Global Initiative Education Advisory Board. Dr. Barrett has been a member of the National Governors' Association Task Force on Innovation America, the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, the Committee on Scientific Communication and National Security, the U.S.-Brazil CEO Forum, past chair of the National Academy of Engineering, and formerly served on the Board of Directors of the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association, the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, and TechNet.      

Maureen Biggers

Maureen has more than 30 years of experience working with college students, faculty, and professionals in the areas of student retention, leadership, teams, diversity, and broadening participation in computing. In addition to serving as Assistant Dean for Diversity and Education for Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing, Maureen is the co-PI and Program Manager for the Alliance for the Advancement of African-American Researchers in Computing, is Co-Chair of the Academic Alliance for the National Center for Women in Information Technology, and Chair of the Indiana Aspiration in Computing 2011 statewide competition for high school girls. She has been a co-PI on several other Broadening Participation in Computing grants, including STARS, Georgia Computes!, Increasing the Representation of Undergraduate Women and Minorities in Computer Science, and Extending Contextualized Computing in Multiple Institutions Using Threads.

She has co-authored papers on topics such as peer led team learning to improve success and retention in CS intro classes, retention of CS majors, improving secondary CS education. Also involved in pre-collegiate level CS education, she was founding Vice President of the Computer Science Teachers Association and she developed the Institute for Computing Education, a partnership between the Georgia DOE and the GT College of Computing.

Marie Bjerede

Marie Bjerede is a writer, speaker, and champion for education reform. She believes people acting as independent agents can collaborate to get more done and live happier lives. She's seen, first-hand, how technology co-evolves with that model. She thinks a lot about how students, citizens, and employees can take ownership of their work and create force multipliers for productivity, creativity, and happiness.

Marie has spent a quarter century in the wireless communication industry working in many roles -- from embedded software coder to leadership geek to education advocate. Marie served as Vice President of Wireless Education Technology at Qualcomm Inc. In her tenure with Qualcomm, Bjerede led a wide variety of teams through the successful conception, development, and deployment of wireless communications systems including government, enterprise, and consumer platforms. From this front-row seat to the wireless revolution, she's seen mobile broadband bring the transformative potential of the Internet to industries and communities. But she's also watched as schools have been left behind. With her wireless communication background, she's now challenging technical, economic, social, and systemic obstacles.

Mary Brabeck

Mary has served as Dean and Professor of Applied Psychology at NYU Steinhardt since October 2003. A leader in the field of applied psychology, she was the Dean of Boston College’s Lynch School of Education from 1996-2003 and a Professor of Counseling and Developmental Psychology at Boston College from 1980-2003. Her research interests include intellectual and ethical development, values and conceptions of the moral self, professional ethics, inter-professional collaboration, and evidence-based teacher education. Mary has served as a member of the American Psychological Association’s Board of Educational Affairs 2004-2007, the Carnegie Corporation’s Teachers for a New Era Research Coordinating Council, and the Standing Hearing Panel of the Ethics Committee. She chaired the APABEA Task Force on Applications of Psychological Science to Teaching and Learning and is a member of CRSPPP, the Board of Directors of the National Church Leadership Roundtable, the Board of Trustees of the Ross Global Academy, and the Academic Advisory Board of Facing History and Ourselves. She is currently on the executive committee of the Council of Academic Deans in Research Education Institutions.

Leah Buechley

Leah Buechley is an Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab where she directs the High-Low Tech research group. The High-Low Tech group explores the integration of high and low technology from cultural, material, and practical perspectives with the goal of engaging diverse groups of people in developing their own technologies. Leah received PhD and MS degrees in computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a BA in physics from Skidmore College.

Idit Caperton

Idit Harel Caperton is a social entrepreneur and a pioneer in using new-media technology for creative learning, innovation and globalization through constructionist learning theory. In 2004 she founded the www.WorldWideWorkshop.org to leverage her unique blend of award-winning research, business acumen, and leadership in new-media learning projects around the world. Most recently, the foundation launched www.Globaloria.org to invent new ways of using social networking and Web2.0 tools to teach youth game-making and project-based learning. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Idit conducted breakthrough research at the MIT Media Lab, that led to publishing the book Constructionism with Seymour Papert, and her book Children Designers received the 1991 Outstanding Book Award by the American Education Research Association. In 1995, she launched www.MaMaMedia.com, ConnectedFamily.com, and Papert.org. Pioneering kids Internet media, MaMaMedia established global distribution and advertizing partnerships, and won numerous honors, including: the Computerworld-Smithsonian Award (1999), the Internet industry's coveted Global Information Infrastructure Award (1999), and the 21st-Century Achievement Award from the Computerworld Honors Program (2002). In 2002, she was honored by the Network of Educators in Science and Technology and MIT "for devotion, innovation, and imagination in science and technology on behalf of children and youth around the world." Selected MaMaMedia activities were recently re-programmed for OLPC. Idit holds degrees from Tel Aviv University (BA, 1982), Harvard University (EdM 1984; CAS 1985), and MIT Media Lab (PhD, 1988). She is a published author and speaker worldwide, and serves on Advisory Boards and Committees at MIT Media Lab, Harvard, CUNY, CU, PBSKids, MEET, TIG, and Saybot.com.

Sara Chipps

Sara is an independant developer living in NYC specializing in web applications with a focus on JavaScript and Startups. In her spare time she Wrangles Nerds. You can find her code and rants at http://GirlDeveloper.com

She is the co-founder of Girl Develop It (http://GirlDevelopIt.com) a program that provides low cost software development classes targeted towards women. GDI offers HTML/CSS, Javascript, Ruby on Rails, and beginner programming classes to over 100 students a month in NYC, Sydney, and other locations in the US coming soon.

Sara likes speaking to and meeting with diverse groups from the Girl Scouts to straight up code junkies. Her goal is to inspire more females to see that being a developer is fun and glamorous.

Kevin Clark

Kevin Clark, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Instructional Technology program, and the Director of the Center for Digital Media Innovation and Diversity in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University. He holds both bachelors and masters degrees in computer science from North Carolina State University as well as a Ph.D. in Instructional Systems from Pennsylvania State University.

Prior to his work in academia, Dr. Clark worked as a designer and senior program manager for Lightspan, Inc. (currently Plato Learning), a leading provider of educational software and interactive media. Dr. Clark's research interests include the role of video games and interactive media in the education of children in formal and non-formal learning environments, particularly from underserved communities. His scholarly activities focus on the use of video game design to increase interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers, and issues of diversity in the design and development video games and other educational media.

Dr. Clark has been selected as a Fulbright Senior Specialist Roster Candidate, and his research activities have been funded by such organizations as: the Defense Acquisition University, AMD Foundation, Hoop Magic Foundation, WIN-WIN Strategies Foundation, National Science Foundation, U.S. Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management. Dr. Clark also serves as an advisor and consultant to many non-profit and for-profit organizations.

Gabriella Coleman

Trained as an anthropologist, Gabriella (Biella) Coleman examines the ethics of online collaboration/institutions as well as the role of the law and digital media in sustaining various forms of political activism. She has published extensively on hackers and the anthropology of digital media and is currently completing a book manuscript "Coding Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software" with Princeton University Press. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

Tony DeRose

Tony DeRose is currently a Senior Scientist and lead of the Research Group at Pixar Animation Studios. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1985. Before joining Pixar in 1996 he was a professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington. In 1999 he received the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, and in 2006 he received a Scientific and Technical Academy Award (c) for his work on the mathematics of surfaces. He loves working in the garage with his two sons on various whacky engineering projects, many of which are a combination of hardware, software and art. He and his family have attended every Bay Area Maker Faire and have exhibited at the Faire the last three years. These experiences led him to launch the Young Makers Program (http://youngmakers.org), a collaboration between Pixar, Maker Faire, and The Exploratorium intended to inspire creativity in youth through ambitious hands-on activities.

Ruthe Farmer

Ruthe Farmer has focused her efforts on increasing girls’ participation in technology and engineering since 2001. As Director of Strategic Initiatives, she provides strategic planning and direction, fund development, and cultivation of new partnerships for NCWIT. Ruthe oversees the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing and  efforts to accelerate distribution of NCWIT promising practices and resources throughout the computing community and beyond.

In a previous position as the National Project Manager for Technology & Engineering Education for Girl Scouts of the USA, Ruthe designed and implemented national programs and partnerships to increase girls’ participation in STEM and managed the K-12 Informal Education Hub of the National Center for Women & IT. She was responsible for establishing a national Lego Robotics initiative, scaling out the Intel Design & Discovery program to 63 councils, and forming a national partnership between FIRST Robotics and Girl Scouts of the USA.

Ruthe has served on the NCWIT Leadership Team and as the co-chair of the NCWIT K-12 Alliance, on the National Girls Collaborative Project Champions Board, the FIRST Robotics Girls FIRST Advisory Board, and is a founding board member of Springboard Innovation, a nonprofit dedicated to incubating grass roots social entrepreneurs. She was recently named to the Lewis & Clark College Board of Alumni, is an ambassador for the University of Oxford Said Business School, and serves on the Girl Scouts of Colorado STEM Advisory Committee.

Ruthe brings a wealth of experience in informal education, national collaboration, and fund development. She recently completed the MBA in Social Entrepreneurship & Marketing at the University of Oxford and is passionate about integrating innovative entrepreneurial strategies into her work.

Wendy Faulkner

Wendy Faulkner trained in biology and then science and technology policy studies, doing her doctoral research at the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex. She joined the University of Edinburgh in 1988 where she worked chiefly as a sociologist of technology. She was centrally involved in developing and running Edinburgh's postgraduate programmes in science and technology studies until she retired from her academic post in 2009.

Wendy Faulkner has a longstanding research interest in gender, science and technology, starting with her involvement in the early women and science collection. Alice through the Microscope (Virago, 1980), followed by a women and technology reader, Smothered by Invention, with Erik Arnold (Pluto, 1985). She has since made significant contributions to feminist technology studies, most notably through a major ethnographic study of engineering workplaces, Genders in/of Engineering, which included research in a US IT company. In addition, she was involved in EU collaborative projects on gender inclusion in the information society (SIGIS) and on women in engineering research (PROMETEA), the latter involving a cross-national study of good practice in gender equality and diversity.

Wendy Faulkner has pursued other strands of research. Earlier, she conducted several research projects on knowledge flows in industrial R&D and innovation, the largest on industry-university research links in new technological fields (Knowledge Frontiers, with Jacqueline Senker, Clarendon, 1995). She recently collaborated on a project on public engagement in debates surrounding stem cell research, and has an ongoing interest in dialogue techniques and the politics of public participation.

Mary Flanagan

Mary Flanagan is an innovator focused on how people create and use technology. Her groundbreaking explorations across the arts, humanities, and sciences represent a novel use of methods and tools bind research with cultural production. Interested in how human values are in play across technologies and systems, Flanagan has written more than 20 critical essays and chapters on games, empathy, gender and digital representation, art and technology, and responsible design. Her three books in English include the recent, Critical Play (2009) with MIT Press.

Flanagan founded the Tiltfactor game research laboratory in 2003, where researchers study and make social games, urban games, and software in a rigorous theory/practice environment. She is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College. 

Sam Graham-Felsen

Sam Graham-Felsen is a pioneer in the rapidly growing field of emerging media, both as a strategic advisor and as a key member of President Barack Obama’s online campaign team.

Graham-Felsen is an emerging media expert, skilled in using technology to share information in new and innovative ways. As he sees it, the current trends in marketing include an explosion in digital media with the development and expansion of social networks, videos, blogs, forums, instant messaging, mobile marketing, email marketing, rich media, and paid and organic search; these new online trends extend to offline trends in discovering the power of customer engagement and word-of-mouth practices in marketing campaigns.

As the chief blogger and “narrator-in-chief” on the 2008 presidential campaign, his most important mission was to recognize the power of ordinary people and help them organize through the power of social media. Pronounced by BBC as the “key to [Obama’s] victories,” much of the campaign’s record-breaking achievements were thanks to the media team, including Graham-Felsen: they raised $500 million online, shattering previous records; had an e-mailing list of 13 million, the largest in political history; generated 200,000 offline events created by supporters on my.BarackObama.com; and created one thousand videos on YouTube, which were viewed for over one billion minutes in total. Driving home the message that the campaign was about “you” – the everyday person, the citizen, the voter – Obama’s online campaign changed the political game and cemented the incredible power of grassroots organization. 

Previously, Graham-Felsen worked for Frontline and The Nation; following his work on the Obama campaign, he worked as Director of Strategic Planning at Blue State Digital, one of America’s premier digital marketing firms. While there, he consulted on digital strategy for organizations including the American Red Cross, Partners in Health, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, National Geographic, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate Modern, Carnegie Hall, US Soccer, and the US Olympic Committee. He has been featured in such publications as The Washington Post, Newsweek, O Globo (Brazil), Strategies (France), Wired Italy, and Fast Company, which named the Obama media team “The Most Innovative Startup of 2009,” beating out Apple and Google. In 2010, Guardian (UK) named Graham-Felsen one of the “Top 50 US Politics Twitter Accounts to Follow.” 

Graham-Felsen is a regular speaker and consultant on how the Internet is changing politics, no nprofits, and businesses. He has spoken for a wide range of audiences, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Oxford Universities; the University of Southern California; Google’s Washington, DC headquarters; the US Senate Democratic Caucus Luncheon; and before corporate audiences including Pepsi, Ferrari, Ritz Carlton, Hyatt, and Yahoo!

A Boston native, Graham-Felsen was born in the neighborhood of Jamaica Plain and attended Boston Public Schools before graduating with honors from Harvard.

Dennis Groth

Dennis Groth is currently Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing, and the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies for the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington. His responsibilities include curricular programs, student services, advising, recruiting, academic operations, and career services. In addition to his Informatics and Computing responsibilities, Dennis serves as Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education for Indiana University Bloomington. In this capacity, he is responsible for a variety of critical campus programs, including curricular procedures, outreach, service learning, continuing and adult education, course evaluation processes, and test administration. His research focuses on the development of new database access and data mining techniques in support of data visualization activities. He is particularly interested in exploring ways in which visualizations can be manipulated in the same fashion as the data that generates the visualizations.

Carol Jenkins

Carol Jenkins is an award-winning writer, producer and media consultant. She is a sought-after speaker and writer on issues relating to the media, specifically the participation of women and people of color; women’s participation in the political and economic structures in the US; and the health of women in developing countries, particularly on the African continent.

An Emmy-winning former television journalist, she was founding president and board member of The Women's Media Center, the groundbreaking non-profit aimed at increasing coverage and participation of women in the media. In that WMC role she conceived the acclaimed Progressive Women's Voices media leadership program, and acquired and expanded the largest portfolio of women experts in the country, SheSource.

Carol Jenkins is Chair of the Board of Directors of AMREF USA. The African Medical & Research Foundation, a 53 year old organization based in Nairobi and founded as The Flying Doctors, is the largest African health NGO on the continent. AMREF operates in more than 30 countries in the delivery of services, training of a local health workforce, and providing safe water and sanitation. AMREF is winner of both The Bill and Melinda Gates Award for Global Health and The Hilton Humanitarian Prize.

In addition to continuing to serve on The Women’s Media Center board, she is Chair of the Black Maternal Health Advisory Board of Women’s eNews, the online international women’s newspaper; member of the President's Council of Advisors at The National Council for Research on Women; and an Advisory board member of the Caring Economics Campaign, a project of Riane Eisler’s Center for Partnership Studies. Ms Jenkins formerly served on the boards of The Ms Foundation for Women and The Feminist Press.

Carol Jenkins is the co-author, with her daughter Elizabeth Gardner Hines, of Black Titan: A.G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire. A biography of her uncle, it was winner of Best Non-Fiction award from the Black Caucus of The American Library Association. She was an Executive Producer of Eve Ensler’s Sundance award-winning documentary, What I Want My Words to Do to You and is a contributor to the recently published book, Secrets of Powerful Women, Leading Change for a New Generation.
A recipient of both the Lifetime Achievement and International Reporting awards from the National Association of Black Journalists/NY, she holds honorary degrees from the women's colleges Marymount Manhattan College and The College of New Rochelle. Recent honors include The 2009 North Star News Prize, and the 2008 Women's Equality Award from The National Council of Women's Organizations.
carol jenkins: media/ 646.596.2550 /carol@caroljenkinsmedia.com

Jane Margolis

Jane Margolis is a Senior Researcher at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. She is the PI of the NSF grant, Into the Loop Alliance Extension and Teachers are Key, and co-PI on Mobilizing for Innovation of Computer Science Teaching and Learning. Her work focuses on democratizing computer science education and broadening participation in the field. Jane is an action researcher whose work focuses on building authentic partnerships to address structural inequalities and belief systems that perpetuate segregation and denied learning opportunities. She is the co-author of two books on the inequities in computer science education. Her 2002 book, Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (MIT Press), examines the gender gap in computer science at the college level, and her 2008 book, Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing (MIT Press), examines the daily experiences of students and teachers in three Los Angeles public high schools, all with high numbers of African-American and Latino/a students. Stuck in the Shallow End received the 2008 Prose Award in the Education category from the Association of American Publishers. Jane received her master’s in psychology and her Ed.D in education from Harvard University.

Sylvia Martinez

Sylvia Martinez is a veteran of interactive entertainment and educational software industries, with over a decade of design and publishing experience.

Prior to joining Generation YES, Sylvia oversaw product development, design and programming as Vice President of Development for Encore Software, a publisher of game and educational software on PC, Internet and console platforms. Sylvia was also involved in the company's Internet initiatives, including Math.com, the award-winning web site that provides math help to students worldwide.

For seven previous years, Sylvia was an executive producer at Davidson & Associates/Knowledge Adventure, a leading educational software developer. She designed, developed and launched dozens of software titles including Math Blaster: Algebra, Math Blaster: Geometry and Maurice Ashley Teaches Chess. In addition, she was responsible for Educast - the first Internet service for teachers that provided teachers with free news, information and classroom resources. Prior to joining Davidson & Associates, Martinez spent six years at Magnavox Research Labs, where she developed high-frequency receiver systems and navigation software for GPS satellites.

Sylvia has been a featured speaker at national education technology conferences in areas ranging from the use of the Internet in schools, Web 2.0 technologies, student leadership, digital citizenship, project-based and inquiry-based learning with technology and gender issues in science, math, engineering and technology (STEM) education. She holds a Master's in Educational Technology from Pepperdine University, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Sarah Mei

Sarah Mei is a software engineer at Pivotal Labs in San Francisco and the co-founder of RailsBridge, a non-profit dedicated to making the technical community around the Ruby programming language welcoming to all. 

At RailsBridge, Sarah's Open Workshop project has taught over 600 women how to program in Ruby, and in some cases, how to program. She has personally instructed classes in five different cities and is thrilled to see the program spreading to both more cities (including New York!) and more languages.

At Pivotal Labs, Sarah brings her dozen-plus years of software development experience to bear on projects for startups and small companies. She's a strong proponent of small-a agile, and a pair programming fangirl. She's also a core committer on the Diaspora project - changing the world with open source social networking software.

Arikia Millikan

Arikia is Community Manager of Wired.com. Her current projects include Wired Science Blogs, Haiti Rewired, and the Wired.com How-To Wiki. Arikia has volunteered as an ambassador with the HackNY program, was an organizer of the Hackers (the movie) 15th Anniversary Party, and frequents various events in the NY tech scene. She really likes parrots.

Alexis Ohanian

Alexis Ohanian co-founded Reddit, a platform for "social news" where the readers themselves control the front page by voting stories up and down. He is the founder of Breadpig, a seller of "geeky things" that donates all profits in philanthropical ways (Think: Newman's Own for Nerds). He is a former Kiva Fellow, Ambassador to the East for Y Combinator, and currently the head of marketing for hipmunk.com, a travel search engine.

Scott Page

* SLIDES FROM SCOTT PAGE'S TALK (PDF) *

Scott Page is director of the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan, where he serves as Leonid Hurwicz Collegiate Professor of Complex Systems, Economics, and Political Science. He is also a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Social Research and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences.

Scott Page researches how diversity improves performance and decision making, when 'diversity' means what NOT we look like on the outside, but rather than what we look like within -- the tools and abilities that make each of us unique. Scott's key insight: Groups made up of intelligent people who are inwardly diverse-that is, who have different perspectives, mindsets and ways of solving problems-can make more accurate predictions and solve problems more effectively than groups of "experts."

He is the author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, about how we think in groups and why collective wisdom works.

Scott also studies complex systems. He is the author of Complex Adaptive Systems and is on the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute, the world-renowned research center dedicated to using complexity science to solve human problems.

Scott's next book, Diversity and Complexity (due fall 2010) provides an introduction to the role of diversity in complex adaptive systems. He explains how diversity underpins system level robustness, allowing for multiple responses to external shocks and internal adaptations.

Ken Perlin

Ken Perlin is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University, directs the NYU Games For Learning Institute. He was also founding director of the Media Research Laboratory and director of the NYU Center for Advanced Technology. His research interests include graphics, animation, user interfaces, science education and multimedia. He received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his noise and turbulence procedural texturing techniques, which are widely used in feature films and television, as well as the 2008 ACM/SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, the TrapCode award for achievement in computer graphics research, the NYC Mayor's award for excellence in Science and Technology and the Sokol award for outstanding Science faculty at NYU, and a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. Dr. Perlin is general chair of the UIST2010 conference, and has been a featured artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Dr. Perlin received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University, and a B.A. in theoretical mathematics from Harvard University. Before working at NYU he was Head of Software Development at R/GREENBERG Associates in New York, NY. Prior to that he was the System Architect for computer generated animation at Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. He has served on the Board of Directors of the New York chapter of ACM/SIGGRAPH, and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the New York Software Industry Association.

Helen Peterson

Helen Peterson is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Thematic Studies – Technology and Social Change at Linköping University, Sweden. Her main field of research concerns the links between the gendered construction of technical competence and social mobility in work organizations. She has studied how gendered work ideals influence career possibilities for women and men in various technical work settings: in the Swedish engineering industry, in the IT business and in engineering research in the academic sector.

Dr. Peterson received her doctor's degree in Sociology in 2005 from Uppsala University, Sweden, with the thesis named Gender, Power and Post-Bureaucracy, Work Ideals in IT Consulting. Since then she has continued to do research on masculinities, femininities and the performance of technical competence and the gendered cultures of engineering. In addition, she is also performing research on new technologies and the blurring of temporal and spatial boundaries between work and private life, i.e. work/life-balance issues in high tech work environments.

In 2006-2007 she worked in the research project PROMETEA: Empowering Women Engineers in Industrial and Academic Research, funded by the European Commission in the 6th Framework Programme. In 2008 she was a visiting scholar at IAS-STS (Institute for advanced studies in science, technology and society) in Graz, Austria. She is currently involved in a number of different ongoing research projects, amongst them Gendered Conditions and Gendered Constructions in ICT Offshoring (project leader Minna Salminen-Karlsson, Uppsala University).

For more information about her publications, please confer her webpage: http://www.tema.liu.se/tema-t/medarbetare/peterson-helen?l=en&sc=true

Tammy Pirmann

Tammy Pirmann teaches computer science at Springfield Township High School, where her courses include computer science, game design, and web application development. She also serves as an advisor to the Webmaster Computer Club, the Strategic Game Club, and Retina Business Club.

Tammy is President of PACSE, Philadelphia Area Computer Science Educators, a local chapter of CSTA. She also is a member of CSTA, ACM, and SIGCSE.

She received her Masters of Education from Gwynedd Mercy College and her BA in Management Information Systems from Delaware Valley College.

Jan Plass

Jan L. Plass is Professor of Educational Communication and Technology in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University, where he co-directs the Games for Learning Institute. He is the founding director of the CREATE Consortium for Research and Evaluation of Advanced Technology in Education.

Dr. Plass' research is at the intersection of cognitive science, learning sciences, and design, and seeks to enhance the design of visual environments. His current focus is on cognitive and emotional aspects of information design and interaction design of simulations and educational games for science education and second language acquisition. He has received funding for his research from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and, most recently, from Microsoft Research, the Motorola Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Dr. Plass serves on the editorial review boards of some of the most highly ranked journals in his field, including the Journal of Educational Psychology, Educational Technology Research and Development, Computers in Human Behavior, Journal of Computing in Higher Education, and the Journal of Research on Technology in Education.

Karl Reid

For over 10 years, Dr. Karl Reid has been a leading advocate for increasing educational access and opportunity for low-income and minority youth. In his current capacity as Senior Vice President of Academic Programs and Strategic Initiatives at UNCF, he leads the Office of Academic Affairs that awards over 400 scholarship, fellowship and internship programs, and supports the Institute for Capacity Building, the newly launched Social Entrepreneurship Programs, and the Frederick Patterson Research Institute.  His division is responsible for fulfilling the educational mission of UNCF that annually enables over 60,000 students to attend over 900 colleges and universities.

Prior to his current position at UNCF, Dr. Reid served as Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education at MIT and Director of the Office of Minority Education. In this capacity, he was responsible for the academic performance and leadership development of over 800 underrepresented minority (URM) students. Dr. Reid also held the title of Assistant to the MIT Chancellor for Student Diversity, where he delivered institutional and programmatic solutions for increasing URM graduate student matriculation. Prior to these appointments, Dr. Reid served for eight years as the Executive Director of Engineering Outreach Programs for MIT’s School of Engineering, where he directed local and national college access programs that aimed to increase the number of students from underserved and underrepresented communities prepared to study science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). For five years, Dr. Reid taught a freshman seminar on race, identity and academic achievement. He also served on MIT’s Committee on Undergraduate Engineering Practice, the Committee on Campus Race Relations, and the Presidential Task Force on Minority Student Achievement.

Born and raised in New York, Dr. Reid earned both his Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT, and his Doctorate of Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research interests explore the relationships between racial identity and self efficacy, and their influence on the academic achievement of African American males in higher education.

Dr. Reid served as National Chairperson of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) and is a member of the Tau Beta Pi National Engineering Honor Society.

After graduating from MIT, Dr. Reid worked for 12 years in the computer industry in product management, marketing, sales, and consulting for several companies, including six years with IBM where he won several regional and branch awards.

Dr. Reid served on the steering committee of the community-based Boston Campaign for Proficiency, and the educational advisory boards of the John Coleman Wright Scholarship Foundation and the New City Scholars Program at Gordon College. He also served on the governing board of the Black Alumni of MIT (BAMIT) and the Board of Trustees for the MATCH Charter High School in Boston. Prior to recently relocating to Washington, DC, he directed Christian education at the Bethel AME Church and, along with his wife, co-chaired the Community for Diversity Committee at Milton Academy.

Among his honors and rewards, Dr. Reid was named “Minority Engineering Program Director of the Year” by NSBE and “Outstanding Advisor of the Year” by the MIT Academic Resource Center. He is also a recipient of the YMCA Black Achievers Award, the MIT Presidential Award for Community Service, and the MIT Excellence Award for his outreach efforts.

Mitch Resnick

Mitch Resnick directs the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the Media Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he develops new technologies to engage people (particularly children) in creative learning experiences. He also serves as Head of the Media Arts and Sciences academic program and Director of the Okawa Center. His research projects include:

Scratch: Democratizing Digital Expression. With Scratch software, kids can create their own interactive stories, games, and animations - and share their creations online. Kids learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively, while learning important computational ideas. Scratch has been called "the YouTube of interactive media."

Programmable Bricks: Learning through Designing. With Programmable Bricks, children can build and program their own robots, kinetic sculptures, and other interactive inventions - and learn science and engineering concepts in the process. Programmable Bricks served as inspiration for the LEGO MindStorms, PicoCricket, and LEGO WeDo robotics kits.

Computer Clubhouse: Bridging the Digital Divide. Resnick co-founded the Computer Clubhouse project, an international network of 100 after-school centers where youth from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies.

Laurel J. Richie

Laurel J. Richie is responsible for Girl Scouts of the USA's brand, communications, publishing, marketing, and Web-based initiatives.

With a key role in the launch of GSUSA's new core business strategy, Richie is also helping to ensure that a comprehensive media and communications strategy is in place to support the organization's strategic priorities.

Previously, Richie held the position of senior partner, executive group director, at Ogilvy & Mather, where she worked on a long series of noteworthy campaigns for clients including Campbell Soup, American Express, Chesebrough-Pond's, Oscar Mayer, Maidenform, Pepperidge Farm, Springs Industries, and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Working in partnership with Kimberly-Clark, she played a key role in building Huggies into a leading global brand and helped transform Kotex into a more modern brand for today's young women. She sat on Ogilvy New York's Operating Board and was a founding member of the agency's Employee Advisory Council on Diversity and Inclusion.

Richie's pro-bono clients included the Museum for African Art, the Hospital for Special Surgery, and the New York Human Rights Commission. In addition, she has mentored young women and girls as part of Big Brothers/Big Sisters, the 4A's Multicultural Advertising Intern Program, Xavier University's Youth Motivation Task Force, and the Advertising Educational Foundation. A graduate of Dartmouth College, Richie is a recipient of the YMCA's Black Achiever's Award and Ebony magazine's Outstanding Women in Marketing and Communications.

Jean Ryoo

Jean Ryoo specializes in educational research and high school teacher support in the "Into the Loop" and "Teachers are Key" projects currently funded by the National Science Foundation. These projects--housed at the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles--focuses on democratizing access to quality computer science and technology education in our public schools through a curriculum entitled "Exploring Computer Science." She is also working with a mobile-phone based project entitled "Mobilize" that teaches high school students how to conduct community-based research using mobile phones and apps of their own design. Her research interests--in critical pedagogy, cultural historical activity theories of learning, and equity and access in public schooling--stem from her work teaching in varying contexts as an art teacher, after school program educator, English teacher for French public schools, and middle and high school Social Studies and English teacher in Hawaiian public schools.

Lucy Sanders

Lucy Sanders is CEO and Co-founder of the National Center for Women & Information Technology and also serves as Executive-in-Residence for the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

She has an extensive industry background, having worked in R&D and executive positions at AT&T Bell Labs, Lucent Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs for over 20 years, where she specialized in systems-level software and solutions (multi-media communication and customer relationship management.) In 1996, Lucy was awarded the Bell Labs Fellow Award, the highest technical accomplishment bestowed at the company, and she has six patents in the communications technology area.

Lucy serves on several boards, including the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) Board of Trustees at the University of California at Berkeley; the Engineering Advisory Council at the University of Colorado at Boulder; the National Girls Collaborative Project Advisory Board; the Advisory Board for the Women's College Applied Computing Program at the University of Denver; the ATLAS Advisory Board; and several corporate boards. She is a member of the ACM nominating committee and the ACM-W Advisory Board.

In 2004 Lucy was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Department of Engineering at CU and in 2007 she was inducted into the Women in Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame. Lucy has served as Conference Chair and Program Chair for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, as well as  the Information Technology Research and Development Ecosystem Commission for the National Academies. In 2009 she was recognized as a Microsoft Community Partner.

Lucy received her B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Louisiana State University and the Univ ersity of Colorado at Boulder, respectively.

Tobi Saulnier

As Founder and CEO of 1st Playable Productions, Tobi Saulnier leads a game development studio that has created such hit games such as Club Penguin for the Nintendo DS, Ben 10 DS, Disney Princess DS, and a number of other DS games designed for very specific demographics ("kids' games", "girls' games", etc). The studio is also known for innovative gameplay, including networked features, downloadable content, and integration of real and virtual worlds. The studio also creates games for education and social change, including retail and research titles. Before joining the game industry, Tobi managed R&D in embedded and distributed systems at General Electric Research and Development, where she also led initiatives in new product development, software quality, business strategy, and outsourcing. An upstate NY native, she earned her BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her current interest is in the area of social entrepreneurship and the challenges of creating a community-centric local small business that can be sustainable in an aggressive global market.

Karen L. Tonso

Dr. Karen L. Tonso is an Associate Professor of Social Foundations in the College of Education at Wayne State University. She worked for 15 years as a reservoir engineer in the petroleum industry. Her research in engineering education received the 1999 Mary Catherine Ellwein Outstanding Dissertation Award (Qualitative Research Methodology) and 1998 Selma Greenberg Distinguished Dissertation Award (Research on Women and Education) from the American Educational Research Association, and the 2009 Betty Vetter Award for Research from Women in Engineering ProActive Network. She is a co-author of Women's Science, and the author of On the Outskirts of Engineering, numerous book chapters, journal articles, and presentations at national and international conferences.

Rob Tucker

Rob Tucker is Managing Partner of Grey Matter Partners, an organization dedicated to effective leadership and executive development for technical expertise organizations. With 20 years of experience serving the unique needs of such organizations, Rob and his partners offer a highly customized approach to leadership and executive development. They understand expertise-based organization's unique timelines, professional development paths, and markets. They've worked with more than 100 organizations including some of the largest technology and technical expertise organizations in the world. They have extensive experience in the emerging geographies as well as Europe and the United States. Their experience spans leaders ranging from entry-level hires to C-level executives at all stages of an organization's life-cycle including early startup, rapid growth, mature market profitability, reinvention and turnaround.

Tucker earned a Ph.D. in technical communication from the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California. His work examined best practices in “science translation,” the communication of highly technical material to non-scientific audiences. At the Leadership Research Institute (LRI), Tucker focused his work in two primary commercial sectors: finance and technology. His work with financial organizations includes coaching and facilitation for a number of global investment banks, holding banks, and other financial entities; his work in the technology field includes coaching, presentations and speaking engagements, and facilitation for large-scale engineering and technical clients, including global hardware and software development organizations.

Tucker is an avid technology fan and a passionate reader in the fields of neuroscience, history and macroeconomics.

Vivek Wadhwa

Vivek Wadhwa is a senior research associate with the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and an executive in residence/adjunct professor at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University. He helps students prepare for the real world, lectures in class and leads groundbreaking research projects. He is also an advisor to several start-up companies, a columnist for BusinessWeek.com and a contributor to several international publications.

Since joining Duke University in August 2005, he has researched globalization, its impact on the engineering profession and the sources of the U.S. competitive advantage. Wadhwa's research on American competitive advantages focused on entrepreneurship, skilled immigration, and university research 'commercialization. His research has been supported by several grants from the Kauffman Foundation and by the Sloan Foundation. His work has been cited in over 1,000 national and international media outlets over a 30-month period.

Before joining Duke University, Wadhwa was a technology executive known for being a pioneer of change and innovation. He started his career as a software developer and gained a deep understanding of the challenges in building computer systems. His quest to help solve some of IT's most daunting problems began at New York based investment banking powerhouse CS First Boston, where he was Vice President of Information Services. There he spearheaded the development of technology for creating computer systems which was so successful that CSFB decided to spin off this business unit into its own company, Seer Technologies. As Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Wadhwa helped grow the nascent startup into a $118 million publicly traded company.

With the explosion of the Internet, Wadhwa saw an even greater opportunity to help businesses adapt to new and fast changing technologies, and started Relativity Technologies. As a result of his vision, Wadhwa was named a "Leader of Tomorrow" by Forbes.com. Relativity was named as one of the 25 "coolest" companies in the world by Fortune Magazine.

Marie Wilson

An advocate of women's issues for more than 30 years, Marie C. Wilson is founder and President of The White House Project, co-creator of Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work ® Day and author of Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World (Viking 2004).

In 1998, Wilson founded The White House Project in recognition of the need to build a truly representative democracy - one where women lead alongside men in all spheres. Since its inception, The White House Project has been a leading advocate and voice on women's leadership.

Before she took the helm at The White House Project, Wilson was, for nearly two decades, the President of the Ms. Foundation for Women. She is an honorary "founding mother" of the Ms. Foundation. In honor of her work, the Ms. Foundation has created The Marie C. Wilson Leadership Fund.

Over the last thirty years, Wilson's accomplishments span becoming the first woman elected to the Des Moines City Council as a member-at-large in 1983, co-authoring the critically acclaimed Mother Daughter Revolution (1993, Bantam Books), and serving as an official government delegate to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China in 1995.

Joanne Wilson

I am on my 10th career.  Past work life includes buyer at Macy’s, ran a company in the rag trade, spearheaded sales of a start-up magazine/e-zine/events company in Silicon Alley, chaired MOUSE (Making Opportunities in Upgrading Schools and Education) a non-profit organization focused on technology in inner-city schools, sat on a variety of profit (start-up) and non-profit boards, sat on my kids school board/executive board for years and have been involved with more real estate transactions from beginning to end than I care to mention. 

Currently I am involved with a variety of start-ups from advisor to investor.   The companies are Curbed (Eater/Racked), Food52, Red Stamp, Catchafire, Dailyworth, Editd, Ricks Picks, Cacao Pietro, Hot Bread Kitchen, Gotham Gym, The Moon Group and MOUSE.  I am also an investor in a few restaurants and sit on the board of the Highline. 

I have been blogging for over seven years under the name Gotham Gal.  Love to bake, cook, throw a good party, travel, read, collect art, do the crossword and stay on top of what’s happening all over the world and particularly NYC.

My most successful venture is being married to my best friend Fred and raising my three kids, Jessica, Emily and Josh.