Keynote Speakers
Moj Mahdara is the Founder and CEO of Beautycon, a globally-recognized community for content creators, celebrities, fans, and brands. As CEO, she is responsible for driving brand vision for Beautycon and its growth initiatives, which include strategic media partnerships, content development and distribution, market intelligence, and e-commerce.
Mahdara is an accomplished speaker, business figure and an active investor with international recognition for her expertise in Gen Z and Millennial consumer profiles and behaviors. She has been named to multiple lists over the years, including ones in Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire magazine; Fast Company’s “Most Creative People” list, The Hollywood Reporter’s “Top 25 Most Powerful Digital Players,” Women’s Wear Daily’s “Digital Power Posse” list and Variety’s “Digital Entertainment Execs to Watch,” and has traveled nationally and internationally to present Beautycon’s first market intelligence white paper, FOMO Vol. 1.
Mahdara resides in Los Angeles with her wife, Roya, their son, Neev, and their dog, Sufi.
Masters of Ceremony
SHALLY ZOMORODI, Co-Anchor FOX 5 Morning news
My alarm goes off at 2 a.m. every weekday morning to co-anchor the FOX 5 Morning news from 6a.m. – 10 a.m. Many people look at me with shock and surprise when they hear how early I wake up.
Yes, it’s early, it's dark and you are still sleeping. But it’s worth it. I work with the most amazing people. Raoul makes me laugh all morning and Chrissy is one of my dearest friends. Not to mention all the wonderful people who make up our team.
I graduated from California State University Fullerton with B.A. in both Communications and Political Science. Not wanting to move from California I decided to attend law school. I held the title of Miss Orange County USA at that time and while competing for Miss California USA my life changed. I won an award from the producers of KTTV FOX 11 in Los Angeles for Journalism. The award gave me the chance to tour the studios in Los Angeles and get advice on how to start a career in broadcasting.
That one day turned into an internship which turned into a job as a news assistant for GOOD DAY LA. I left law school and did not look back.
My first on air job was for Good Morning Southeast Texas at the ABC affiliate in Beaumont. I then moved back home to southern California and have been here since. Over the past 12 years I worked as a video journalist for Voice of America, and a reporter/ host for City View Channel 35.
Before coming to FOX 5 I anchored DAYBREAK OC, a 2-hour live morning show. I am now living my dream co-anchoring the FOX 5 Morning News.
When the lights go off, I am back home with my amazing husband Bruce, our three boys and daughter. Life has changed since we had our babies and I love every minute of it. I spend my free time cooking, belly dancing and hanging with my family (known as the Persian Posse). Oh yes — and catching up on sleep.
I’m known around the newsroom for… being Kraft services. Always cooking and feeding the morning team.
If I wasn’t in TV news, I would… be a teacher. When I was a little girl, I would gather all the little kiddos and teach. Even though it’s not my profession today I still look for opportunities to guide and mentor. I am lucky enough to coordinate the intern program here at FOX 5 and get to teach every day!
On my days off, I can be found… rolling somewhere with the Persian Posse as Raoul and Chrissy say. My large family and friends are always getting together to eat, play music or visit some exciting place.
My most memorable TV moment… oh maybe the little moment when Raoul tricked me into licking an IPAD. Payback is coming to Mr. Martinez.My guilty pleasure is… A glass of wine and chocolate.
Moderators
Eileen Brewer is the Director of the Takween Accelerator, the first startup Accelerator in Iraq, which just launched their first cohort in September in the middle of a pandemic! She comes with 20 years of experience working for tech companies in Silicon Valley and 5 years of being an angel investor through Golden Seeds, one of the largest angel groups in the world. She has traveled throughout the MENA region supporting entrepreneurs through training events at American Corners, incubators and universities. She has also been a mentor for the US State Department TechWomen program since 2012 which has introduced her to hundreds of business women in MENA.
Jocelyn founded Him For Her, a social impact venture aimed at accelerating diversity on corporate boards. She has over two decades of technology experience building iconic global mobile apps and market-leading software products at some of the world’s best local, consumer, and marketplace companies, including CitySearch, Ticketmaster, OpenTable and Snagajob.
Jocelyn currently serves on the boards of Papa John’s International, Inc. (NASDAQ: PZZA), ChowNow, an online food ordering system and marketing platform, and is an advisor to Homebase, a platform to help local businesses manage hourly work. Jocelyn was honored as a member of the 2016 class of Henry Crown Fellows at the Aspen Institute, was a global ambassador for the Vital Voices Global Partnership, and was one of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business” in 2015.
Sharif El-Badawi is a founding Managing Partner of Plus Venture Capital (+VC), the leading seed stage investment firm in the Middle East and North Africa region, where he invests across sectors from seed to growth within the region and diaspora. Previously, he co-founded and managed the first US-based venture capital firm with a dedicated fund for the MENA region and was the most active venture capital investor in the region during its investment period from 2017-2020. In his role, he manages the 500 Startups MENA fund, 500 Falcons, which invested in over 180 startups across 15 countries. In addition, Sharif serves on the board of San Francisco Bay Area based non-profit TechWadi where he was the chairman of the board from 2015-2019 helping build meaningful bridges between MENA startups and Silicon Valley. He also serves on several advisory boards for startups, organizations and governments in the MENA region and Silicon Valley.
Prior to his career in investing, Sharif was the Partner Lead to VCs and Startups at Google where he worked with top tier VCs and their most promising startups on strategies that bring all of Google to their businesses. Before joining the Global Partnerships team, he spent 5 years leading performance advertising strategy and solutions for Google's largest customers in North America covering Mobile, Search and Display ads.
He joined Google through the $750m acquisition of AdMob, the world’s leading mobile advertising network. Before AdMob, Sharif was a technologist and serial entrepreneur having founded or co-founded several companies in the Consumer Internet and B2B space over a twelve year period starting in 1998. Sharif earned his Master of Business Administration from University of California, Irvine Merage School of Business and his Bachelor’s of Science in Neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles. He recently relocated from his home state of California to Dubai with his wife and three children.
Sadaf Masaeli, based in San Francisco, is an Iranian Makeup Artist, Beauty Blogger and digital influencer. She started her career in 2014 in the field of makeup training with Instagram as Sadaf Beauty. In a very short time, she was able to attract the attention of Iranian and foreign users. The audience's attention and interest in her caused the world's famous brands such as Huda Beauty, Jeffrey Star, Too Faced, etc. to work with her. In 2019, Sadaf was named the second most influential makeup artist after James Charles by France Forbes and Vogue Magazine. Sadaf has a bachelor's degree in chemistry and AS in health science.
Nora Lamoudi-Sutcliffe has over 15 years of experience in enterprise sales and strategic account management roles in the technology industry. She has worked in London, Paris and Dubai.
Today, she is a Senior Account Director at LinkedIn in London helping large technology clients leverage LinkedIn's Marketing Solutions to drive business growth.
Nora also Co-Leads the Women@LinkedIn Employee Resource Group (ERG) in the UK. Their goal is to achieve gender parity at every level of the organisation through initiatives, programs and resources that empower women in the organisation to achieve their goals.
Rita Makhoul has an eye on what tech entrepreneurs, innovative corporations, and governments are doing in the MENA region. She advises regional and global players by providing them with in-depth insights on the region to support their business objectives. Rita also mentors startups and advises international organizations on the MENA region.
Previously, Rita was responsible for the growth and development of the Arabnet Insights unit. Arabnet Insights collaborates with clients to position them as thought leaders covering a range of products and services produced to educate the market about disruptive technologies, explain the business value, and provide guidance for decision-makers.
Rita has a wealth of strategic experience from her 18 years in the communications industry working with global top agencies including H+K Strategies and TBWA. Having led key accounts across industries and finding her passion in the digital, tech, and startup industry.
Rita was awarded with ‘The Middle East Women Leadership Award’ in 2018 and ‘The Pioneering Women Leader Award’ in 2019.
Speakers
Nazli Alaghband has been at Google for over 11 years, currently leading the PMO (program management organization) for Ads- Measurement products and programs.
Before joining Ads Nazli led Product Operations for Google Cloud where she rolled out processes and tools that enabled ~13,000 Googlers to execute faster and better.
Prior to Google Nazli ran implementation of large scale telephony systems deployments for customer support companies. Nazli holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering.
Shadee Barkan is a seasoned and veteran education technology executive and also an active investor/advisor in ‘future of work’ and mission-driven startups. Shadee is currently Senior Vice President of Global Partnerships at 2U, Inc. (NASDAQ: TWOU). Prior to 2U, Shadee served on the founding team of Trilogy as Chief Partner & Development Officer. Trilogy is a workforce accelerator that partners with the world's leading universities to help companies bridge the digital skills gap. Under Shadee’s leadership, the company grew to 50 university partners in 55 locations globally and over $100M in sales. Trilogy was acquired by 2U, Inc. in 2019.
Prior to joining Trilogy, Shadee was Vice President of Strategic Accounts for Jornaya, a high-growth startup where she was responsible for the acquisition and growth of the company’s education-focused clients. Combined, Shadee brings more than 20 years of executive experience at education technology companies including Kaplan and Peterson’s.
Shadee holds a B.A. in English and French Literature from Rutgers University, and lives in New Jersey with her husband and two ‘always hungry’ teenage sons. Outside of work, Shadee is an avid runner, Whole Foods junkie and is her happiest when traveling with her family to ski, sun, and explore.
Hoda Gerami is a Principal Product Manager at Amazon, currently leading product management for Worldwide Operations IT infrastructure and Computer Vision domains. Hoda joined Amazon four years ago as a Sr. Product Manager, after interning at Amazon as an MBA hire. Over her tenure at Amazon Hoda has worked on Amazon Export Expansion Initiatives, Amazon Fulfillment software, and Operations IT Infrastructure technologies.
Hoda is an experienced product leader who specializes in driving vision and roadmap around business and product scalability and global expansion. Most recently, she has launched a new product that externalizes Amazon Fulfillment Technology warehouse tools and software off of Amazon Corporate Network (making Amazon’s warehouse management software available on the internet). Hoda is known for her customer obsession, ability to effectively collaborate with cross functional teams of business and technical partners, and continuously delivering results.
Hoda has received her MBA from University of Chicago Booth School of Business and has a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce, Finance, and Economics from the University of Toronto. On a personal front, Hoda is passionate about education and empowering everyone to receive education. Hoda sits on the board of Amin Arasteh Foundation, providing financial and merit based scholarships to American/Iranian students and volunteers her time with many other educational based charities.
Samira Khan works at the intersection of social innovation/impact + tech at Salesforce.org (the social impact center of Salesforce). Samira has worked across corporations, governments, and the social sector for over thirteen years on innovative solutions to solving some of society’s greatest challenges. She is especially interested in corporate venturing and business model innovations for good. Her work spans the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia. She is a former strategy / management consultant; and while at A.T. Kearney in Southeast Asia, she played a lead role in starting and building its social impact organization. She is also passionate about topics related to gender and youth empowerment toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). She can be found @samiraakhan on Twitter / LinkedIn.
Heba Sayed is the Strategy Leader for Cloud and AI unit at IBM Middle East and Africa. In her capacity, she leads the strategy development to identify growth opportunities and plans for this high growth unit for IBM. Prior to this role, she has led a number of marketing leadership roles at IBM in Egypt and the UAE. Heba believes she had a cool career, with roles sitting at the intersection of strategy, marketing and technology, and is excited about the rising focus on customer centricity in the region. Heba is also a public speaker on future of marketing and emerging technologies and has spoken in the region’s most renowned conferences like Arab Luxury Summit, DubaiLynx Festival of Creativity, Mashable Social Media Day, Watson Summit, ArabNet Digital Summit, amongst many others. In 2017, Gulf Marketing Review, the leading marketing publications in the Middle East, selected Heba as one of top 40-under-40 marketers in Middle East and North Africa region, in recognition of the role she plays as an active change agent in the world of technology regionally. In 2019, she was selected by Linkedin as a Top Voice in Gulf for her efforts in sparking conversations around emerging technologies. She holds a bachelor’s in business administration, with concentration in Marketing, from the American University in Cairo.
Tala is a Partner at HOF Capital, a global early-stage technology fund investing in next-gen technology companies that have the potential to radically transform the future. She focuses on global opportunities, particularly in FinTech and, and overseas the Fund's MENA pipeline.
Tala is a founding member of Saudi Arabia’s angel investment fund and is a member of its investment committee. She is a strategic advisor to L Catterton Asia, the world’s premier PE firm focused on luxury and consumer brands and is a Board Member at Women In FinTech Bahrain. Her work and original writing has been featured in Financial Times, Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, and other widely-read publications.
Tala holds an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from Harvard University, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Finance & Women Studies from McGill University.
Nooshin is the Founder and CEO of Paxon Energy & Infrastructure Services. In under 3 years, Nooshin has grown the company into America’s #9 fastest growing and a leading Woman Owned consulting management firms heavily focused on improving critical infrastructures in the oil, gas, and utilities industries.
The company’s focus is on energy- innovative approaches that emphasize on technologies for energy-efficient solutions, paving the way for clean and safe energy. Paxon has become a trendsetter and game changer in the oil and gas industry and has been recognized with over 100 awards as a result. In 2019, Paxon was the recipient of the Energy Innovator Award by Corporate Visions as the Best-Woman Run Oil & Gas Services Firm in the USA.
As a multi-disciplinary organization with a focus on superior client service, Paxon specializes in project and program management, construction management and 3rd party inspection, document and project controls, field quality control and safety services.
Nooshin serves as the board president for National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO)- San Francisco Bay Area. She also sits on the advisory boards for American Gas Association (AGA) and To Celebrate Life Breast Cancer Foundation (TCL). She has spoken at hundreds of leading industry events in the US.
In 2020, Nooshin received the Enterprising Woman of the Year Award and was named Top 20 Young Professionals under 40 by Engineering News Records. With 15,007% Three-year growth rate, Paxon was named the #9 fastest growing company in America on the Inc.5000 and No.1 Female Lead company on the same list.
Nooshin holds a B.A. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from UC Davis, and is a graduate of UCLA’s MDE program. She is also a professionally trained piano player and has played for the U.C. Berkeley Jazz Ensemble.
Laila is a Principal at 500 Falcons, 500 Startups’ MENA Fund based out of Dubai. Prior to that, Laila has worked with several Venture Capital across the MENA region; Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP) in UAE and Algebra Ventures in Egypt where she led transactions and worked with portfolio companies on fundraising and operational enhancements. Prior to joining, Laila was active in the venture capital and startup landscape in Egypt, where she worked as a consultant for several start-up businesses assisting them in developing operational and fundraising schemes. She led investment assessments and provided recommendations to several VCs and family offices in the region. In 2014 – while completing her MBA – Laila joined the investment banking division at Morgan Stanley in London as a summer associate, after which she opted to move back to Egypt to pursue a career among the now-thriving startup community. Prior to her postgraduate studies, she worked as an associate at Qalaa Holdings, a regional private equity firm based out of Cairo, where she focused on the alternative energy, oil & gas and glass sectors. Laila earned her master's in Business Administration from the London Business School. She holds a dual undergraduate degree in Business Administration and Law from the American University in Cairo and Cairo University respectively.
Roya Mahboob
A serial entrepreneur and one of the first female CEOs in her home country, Afghanistan. As CEO of Digital Citizens Fund, Bright Citizen (coffee and tea), Roya’s work is focused on digital literacy to bridge the gap between education and the job markets.
Digital Citizens Fund has 15,000 graduates from its 13 digital classrooms and has incubated ten female startups. Roya is currently in development with the Afgan government to build STEM schools in Afghanistan to unlock new opportunities for the inclusion of female entrepreneurs in hard to reach places using airspace and blockchain technology.
Roya is also the champion and coach of the world renowned Afghan Girls Robotics Team, the Afghan Dreamers, who are inspiring a nation to see the potential of girls differently. Roya was named as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in 2013, and received the 2014 Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award, The Advancement of Gender Equality through Education Award, Young Leader of World Economic Forum 2015, Wonder Women 2018, 2019 Education Award Winner, the prestigious Presidential Leadership Scholarship , D.Sc. Honorary Doctor of Science of Engineering from McMaster University, Fellow of Executive education Stanford and is a founding Leader of The NewNow, a group of rising global leaders tackling global challenges.
Born in Iran, grew up in the UK and seven countries later, I have made Switzerland my home. My passion for technology was ignited at age nine and has been the key driver of my career. Now my mission is to make software smarter through Sustainable Circular Technology.
I am committed to merge my software technology knowledge with a deep understanding of the business to achieve ideal solutions for my clients. My passion for technology combined with 30+ years of experience in software consultancy for some of the world's largest enterprises has led me to the first Sustainable Circular Technology.
As a leader, speaker and technology specialist, I challenge the status quo and bring the breadth of my expertise to every conversation.
Now, I am gearing up to turn the technology world on its head, bringing software out of the shadows and into the limelight; with SmarterApproach Methodology (SAM). This is no evolution; get ready for a REVOLUTION.
Shanti Ariker currently serves as VP & Deputy General Counsel at Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), a $1B+ revenue high growth CPaaS business, where she leads the corporate and commercial legal teams. Shanti Ariker has been a practicing lawyer for more than 20 years with experience working internationally and with high-growth companies. As leader of the corporate legal team at Twilio, she attends all board and committee meetings of the company, takes the minutes as Assistant Corporate Secretary.
She has worked closely on Environmental, Social & Governance programs and has expertise in charity law, formation and an understanding of different philanthropic models. Shanti founded the legal pro bono program at Salesforce to work on social justice initiatives, including helping DACA recipients, creating a legal tool kit for judges in connection with the United Nations and Consortium for Street Children.
She serves on the Executive Committee of American Friends of Hebrew University (Pacific Northwest Chapter), the Advisory Board for the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law & Israel Studies and is a board member and corporate secretary for the Simpson Literary Project.
She resides in Lafayette with her husband and twins and is an aspiring writer, currently working on her memoir. Shanti holds a J.D. from University of Virginia.
ilias Benjelloun is the co-founder of MTLNewTech, the largest volunteer-driven tech startup non-profit in Canada for the last 10 years, coaching 1000+ startups along the way. He is also in charge of the Open Innovation Strategy at Desjardins for the last 5 years, co-founding programs such as Cooperathon.com for impact entrepreneurs, or Startup in Residence helping startups blossom within large organizations. He is recognized for empowering organizations, startups, and tech communities alike to have a more symbiotic relationship to deliver fair, respectful, and meaningful open innovations benefiting society.
Asma Ishaq is the Chief Executive Officer of Modere, a global, live clean lifestyle brand whose advanced science portfolio of beauty and personal care, health and wellness, and household products are currently sold in 42 international markets. Ms. Ishaq pioneered the collagen/HA dietary supplement and skincare markets when she co-founded Jusuru International in 2009 with a blue-ribbon product line based on Liquid BioCell®, a highly successful, premiere line of patented liquid collagen and hyaluronic acid nutraceuticals, nutricosmetics and skincare products.
Ms. Ishaq led Jusuru through its acquisition by Modere in February 2017 and was appointed Modere’s CEO less than one year later in January 2018. Ms. Ishaq was named Chairperson of the Collagen Stewardship Alliance, the new collagen trade association created by the Trust Transparency Center, in March 2020.
She is also a committee member on the Council of Responsible Nutrition, sits on the Advisory Board of the Fragrance Creators Association, the Women Business Collaborative (WBC) and the Committee of 200 (C200), is a Zenith member of the Women President’s Organization (WPO), and serves on the Board of Directors of the Direct Selling Association (DSA) and the Direct Selling Education Foundation (DSEF), as well as on the CEO Council of the World Federation Direct Selling Association (WFDSA).
A sought-after speaker on industry stages including the World Collagen Conference and NutriCosmetics Summit, Ms. Ishaq has also appeared on Fox, CBS, ABC, NPR, and in Forbes as a go-to expert. Her work has earned recognition and awards from organizations such as SupplySide West, New Hope and the DSA. She was named NutraChampion by NutraIngredients in 2020 and led her company to the third ranking on the WPO’s annual list of the 50 Fastest Growing Women-Led Companies that same Year.
Ishaq earned her BA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA with a dual concentration in finance and marketing from Rice University. She is the recipient of Rice University’s Alumni Industry Excellence Award in Entrepreneurship.
Hoda is a highly experienced, creative and self-motivated executive; with nearly 25 years of experience in delivering innovation and driving business value for customers in their respective industries. She worked for leading multinational software companies including SAP, Oracle & Microsoft in regional and global capacities, where she lived and worked in three different continents (Europe, Asia and Africa), which gave her a well-rounded experience in dealing with different cultures, challenges and business models.
Hoda joined SAP in 2013 in the UAE where she held various positions before being appointed as Managing Director for SAP Egypt in Feb 2018. In her current capacity, Hoda is responsible for SAP’s in country presence and growth strategy including driving sales, marketing and operations. This in addition to her role in leading global education and training platforms to expand Egypt’s digital ecosystem and workforce. Given her impact in transforming SAP business in the country, Forbes acknowledged her leadership by recognizing her as one of the Middle East Most Influential Women for 2018. She was also recognized as one of the Top50 Women in Egypt in early 2019 & was selected again by Forbes as one of the Power Businesswomen in the Middle East in early 2020. Hoda was nominated by SAP Middle East South cluster employees and awarded the “Diversity & Inclusion Champion” for her leadership and significant impact in that area in 2019 & was also selected to be on the Women to Watch Program at SAP in early 2020.
Hoda is one of the Middle East’s leading technology innovators and pioneers – supporting public and private sector customers to advance their digital transformation agendas, drive new business models, and transform citizen and customer experiences. Since her appointment as Managing Director of SAP Egypt, she made strong progress on Egypt’s investment plan, expanding the breadth and depth of the SAP Channel Partner Program, and is continuing to enhance the partnerships with the academic sector to support young talent development and job creation.
Over the past year, Hoda completely transformed the whole engagement model for the company in Egypt where she engaged strategically with the top leaders in the country starting from the Egyptian President (having 4 interactions with President Sisi in less than a year- two of which were focused roundtables in addition to one dedicated meeting for discussing the company’s business in the country), the Prime Minister, and several key Ministers; actively positioning the value that SAP can bring to the country’s digital transformation agenda, in line with vision 2030, and the positive impact this can yield on the economy.
She also significantly expanded the company’s network to a large number of impactful CEOs, business leaders and top influencers across various industries. This has dramatically transformed the company’s exposure which resulted in winning significant transformational projects in both Public and Private Sectors; including the National Tax Reform Program with the Ministry of Finance, the Transformation of the Oil & Gas Sector with the Minister Of Petroleum, the ERP for the New Administrative Capital among many others.
In the last 2 years, SAP Egypt under her leadership had its best performance ever since the company establishment almost 10 years ago for both revenue and contribution, with a significant double-digit growth for the On-Premise business & triple digit growth for the Cloud business. She also managed to position SAP Egypt as the top performing country across the whole of Middle East South Cluster; winning the Market Unit of the quarter for 6 Quarters out of 8 since her appointment. She also went beyond the Middle East South cluster to be recognized as a winning Market Unit across the whole of Southern Europe, Middle East & Africa Cluster. SAP Egypt was constantly recognized as a Top Employer in Egypt for the first time under her leadership.
Hoda managed to secure significant investments from SAP board to expand the company presence in the country including the establishment of a new office to reflect the aspired growth plan of tripling the presence in the country within three years.
Being the first ever female to be appointed by SAP as a Managing Director in the whole of Middle East & North Africa region in addition to being the first ever female to be appointed to lead a Multinational Software companies in Egypt, Hoda capitalized on her international experience and succeeded to overachieve all her KPIs
Since joining SAP in 2013, Hoda played a pivotal role in supporting the company’s growth strategy to transform the UAE Market. During her role as Chief Operating Officer in 2017, the UAE & Oman won the Market Unit of the Year award and Hoda was recognized as the top COO for Southern Europe, Middle East & Africa region (EMEA South) where she acted as the local executive sponsor for several strategic digital transformation engagements including: Expo2020 Dubai, EmiratesNBD Bank, Etihad Airways, wasl, RTA & Emaar among many others.
Hoda represents women in leadership as part of SAP’s Women Leadership Excellence Acceleration Program (LEAP) across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. She regularly speaks at global and regional forums. She has been also selected by the American Chamber of Commerce to co-chair its Digital Transformation committee for the term starting October 2019.
Hoda holds a B.Sc. with Distinction & Honors in Engineering from Alexandria University in addition to Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) with Distinction from Maastricht School of Management.
Kamelia Aryafar, Ph.D. is the Director of Cloud Artificial Intelligence at Google where she work with amazing teams of ML/AI engineers and scientists focused on building Google cloud AI industry solutions.
Prior to Google, Dr. Aryafar was the Vice President and Head of Data Science at Overstock.com where she led the core machine learning, data science, marketing data science and personalization teams focused on building scalable machine learning, natural language processing, deep learning and computer vision tools to curate a personalized experience for Overstock users.
Prior to Overstock she has been a Senior Machine Learning Scientist at Etsy for more than four years. Before Etsy, she was doing a Ph.D. in computer science and machine learning, building large-scale classification and information retrieval models.
Parvaneh is a Senior network design engineer at The Walt Disney Company, Where she leads Corporate network designs services to various business units within Disney like Media, Parks and Resorts, studios … . She has been with the company for 8 years in different technology roles.
Samrah Khan is a Head of Saas ISV Alliances at Google where she leads the partnerships between SaaS companies and Google Cloud to serve their customers.
Samrah was previously a Senior Executive and Vice President of Business Development at Instart. There, she drove strategic GTM initiatives and global expansion that led to several new streams of revenue and acquisition for the company.
Prior to that she was at MuleSoft responsible for launching alliances with large consulting firms where she built the practice from zero and fueled the velocity to huge IPO. MuleSoft later got acquired by SFDC in 2018. Prior to MuleSoft she was an early employee at TeleNav. She held several critical roles in engineering, product management and sales that contributed to the company growth leading to IPO.
She has a Bachelors in Computer Science from Santa Clara University and currently resides in Bay Area, CA. She is actively engaged in several philanthropy projects, as well as mentor and advisor to many.
When she is not keeping busy with work, you can find her scuba diving somewhere around the globe, learning a new language or enjoying a meal with her husband, 2 kids and a dog.
Sepideh Nasiri is the CEO and Founder of Women of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in Technology (previously known as Persian Women In Tech). She is an award winning serial entrepreneur with over 16 years of experience in the Tech Industry, and a life-time advocate for women, diversity and inclusion.
Sepideh is responsible for the strategy and oversight of Women of MENA in Tech programs and global operations across 17 cities. As the CEO, much of Sepideh’s work is focused on connecting communities, companies, and individuals to bring change in how we should invest in minorities and immigrants.
Sepideh’s leadership is recognized globally for advancing women’s careers in STEM, and developing scalable mentorship and community driven programs. Currently, Sepideh advises global initiatives such as WeMENA, a program by the World Bank, and TechWomen, an initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA). Sepideh mentors many female entrepreneurs and founders in technology around the world, and serves as an advisor to many early stage startups.
Prior to Women of MENA in Tech, Sepideh started her career as a Co-founder and Managing Editor of a digital and print Los Angeles Magazine, and later as the Vice President at Women 2.0.
Sepideh has received several awards from government officials including David Chiu, the Assembly member of California, John Tory, the Mayor of Toronto, Scott Wiener, the Senator of California, and London Breed, the Mayor of San Francisco. In 2014, she was recognized by San Francisco Business Times/Journal “40under40” and Diversity Journal’s 2014 “Women Worth Watching”.
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