Speakers
Hear from inspiring panelists and speakers influencing the technology industry
Interested to talk at “Women of MENA in Tech” 2020 conference?
That’s great! We would love to see women and men from different background sharing their knowledge and experience with our audience.
Get in touch with us and let us know about your subjects of interest and we’ll get back to you about the next steps.
Keynote Speakers
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Speakers
Sepideh (“Sepi”) Nasiri is an award winning serial Entrepreneur with 16 years of experience working in the Tech Industry, the Founder of Persian Women In Tech, the former Vice President at Women 2.0 and a life-time advocate for women, diversity and inclusion. Mrs. Nasiri started her career as a Co-founder and Managing Editor of a digital and print Los Angeles Magazine and later joined a number of successful startups in Silicon Valley.
In 2014, she was recognized by San Francisco Business Times/Journal “40under40” and Diversity Journal’s 2014 “Women Worth Watching”. Currently, Mrs. Nasiri advises early stage startups including at global initiatives such as WeMENA (a program by the World Bank) and mentors globally many female entrepreneurs and founders in technology serving as an advisor to initiatives such as TechWomen, an initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA).
Kate Nowrouzi is the Senior Vice President of Global Email Delivery & Business Strategy at Sparkpost. She built the Deliverability Operation from the ground up and lead all the initial monitoring, alerting and automation efforts. Her team helps Sparkpost enterprise customers achieve a high inbox rate through following email marketing best practices. A recognized authority on email and anti-spam practices, Kate worked as an anti-abuse engineer at AOL anti-spam operation. Before that, she was a Network Engineer at the pioneering ISP, UUNET/ Verizon. Kate continues to be an active voice in the worldwide messaging and anti-spam community.
She is an advocate for diversity and inclusion, mentors young engineers in tech and serves as an adviser to PersianWomen in Tech, a non-profit dedicated to supporting Iranian women inthe STEM fields.
In her free time, she enjoys helping her local high school robotics team as a mentor, promoting Norooz (Persian New Year) celebration at her local schools, senior centers and libraries in Springtime.
She holds a B.S. in Network Engineering and an M.S. in Telecommunication Technologies from Strayer University in Washington D.C. and Leadership and Decision Making Certificate from Stanford University.
Mahtab Ghamsari is an entrepreneur and music/arts enthusiast currently working on transforming how we can interact with the digital world through every day objects. Her previous project VRSUS is a creative application for capturing live music in Virtual Reality and re-creating the concert experience. Her other projects have involved pipelines for machine learning, concert recommendation tools, integrations for online advertising and various small web projects. She studied Systems Design and HCI in the context of music. Her MA thesis presented methods and studies used in mapping live performance (human) gestures to sound in digital musical instruments.
Faranak Farahmand Pour
Currently Faranak lives in Dubai and works at SAP’s Global Strategic Initiatives, a high performing sales organization responsible for the strategy, structure and negotiation of highly complex partnership and opportunities.
Faranak joined GSI in 2015 initially located in The Netherlands focusing on SAP EMEA North region (Great Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and the Baltic countries) and moved to Dubai in August 2016 focusing on SAP EMEA South region (Africa, Middle East, South Europe: Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey). Faranak is a key member of the GSI team successfully leading the strategy, structuring and negotiation of large complex opportunities with our customers in EMEA. Faranak has demonstrated the ability to engage with customers in various countries and cultures. Faranak is also the Chapter Lead for the SAP Business Women’s Network in the United Arab Emirates.
The business women’s network (BWN) is an employee-driven network at SAP to help women advance their careers and the company’s business. By sharing professional insights, best practices, education and experience, we help one another develop skills and career advancing opportunities to drive SAP’s
success. More information can be found on https://news.sap.com/2017/07/ten-years-business-womens-network-sap/ Between August 2013 and July 2015, Faranak headed the Legal Department for SAP in The Netherlands, managing all legal matters for SAP Nederland B.V. including drafting and negotiating agreements (software licensing, Cloud Services, Consulting Services, (IT) outsourcing, purchasing and sales). Prior to joining SAP, Faranak was part of the Legal Depart of Philips International B.V. providing legal support for the divisions of Philips IP&S, “Philips Corporate IT”, “Philips Forwarding and Distribution”, “Philips Group Purchasing” and “FINOPS”(Finance Operations) worldwide. Faranak has a Master of Law in International Business Law and a Bachelor of International & European Law from Tilburg University in The Netherlands, both graduated Cum Laude.
May Samali is passionate about investing in people and ideas that can change the world.
As Chief Operating Officer, New Ventures at High Resolves, May is responsible for building and spinning out a new technology platform for citizenship education across the US. She is also a Venture Partner at NextGen Venture Partners, a network-driven venture capital firm. May's primary areas of interest include venture financing, tech policy, social entrepreneurship and adaptive leadership. She is published on these topics in multiple outlets, including TechCrunch, Forbes, VentureBeat, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and San Francisco Chronicle. She is also a regular speaker at conferences and industry events.
May holds a Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, and Bachelors of Laws and Economic & Social Sciences (First Class Honors & University Medal) from Sydney University. She is a John Monash Scholar and an Australian American Young Leadership Dialogue Fellow. She was a Gleitsman Leadership Fellow and a Social Enterprise Fellow at Harvard's Center for Public Leadership.
May has extensive experience advising startups across the US and Australia. She was formerly an investor at the Urban Innovation Fund, a venture capital firm investing in entrepreneurs shaping the future of cities. Prior to that, she was a Director at Tumml, an urban ventures accelerator in San Francisco. She has also worked as a strategy consultant at a boutique venture firm and as an attorney in Sydney.
In addition, May has worked for the President of the Court of Appeal of the New South Wales Supreme Court. She has also provided strategic advice to Australian governments on innovation and startup policy.
May also has non-profit management experience. She serves as a Member of the Board of Advisors for Persian Women in Tech, an organization supporting Persian & MENA women in STEM. She was previously Deputy CEO at 180 Degrees Consulting, the world's largest volunteer consultancy.
Radin Rahimzadeh is a Connected and Autonomous & Smart City Specialist with Advanced Mobility Group (AMG) where she supports private and public sector visionaries with technology facilitation and implementation to redefine mobility to advance safety, expand accessibility, reduce congestion, and encourage mode shift through adoption of electric and shared modes of transportation. Radin wrote the first Master Plan for the GoMentum Station, a Connected and Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) proving grounds and is a part of the team that brought the first Shared Autonomous Vehicle to California, now approved to test on public roads.
Radin’s approach to introducing new ideas and technology has been by way of systems thinking to make sure that challenges are addressed at their ROOT, solutions are co-created WITH community and positive impacts are enjoyed by ALL community members. Radin uses data to elevate missing stories, build resilient cities, and empower civic spaces.
In 2016, Radin closed her tech empowered nonprofit to support and advise a like-minded leader, Sepideh Nasiri and Persian Women in Tech, an organization creating profound waves of change to empower, elevate and advance Iranian and MENA women in Tech. In addition to PWIT, Radin also advises early-stage startups. In between all of the excitement, Radin unwinds by playing piano, boxing and traveling to connect, converse, and build community around beautiful global cities rich in heart, culture, and history. She speaks fluent Persian, Spanish and English.
Nona Keyhani, Associate (IP, Tech & Data), Reed Smith
Nona grew up in Sweden and came to the UK aged 9 with her family. In 2012, Nona graduated with a Masters in Law from UCL in London and upon completing law school, she commenced her training as a lawyer with the international law firm, Reed Smith LLP. During her training, Nona undertook two in-house secondments; the first with a global media and broadcasting organisation. She assisted on a variety of matters across the business, supporting the commercial and online businesses. Nona also completed an in-house of an investment bank headquartered in New York, before qualifying in 2018. Since qualification, Nona specialises in privacy, data protection and technology law. She advises clients across a diverse range of industry sectors and also works in Barclays Bank in Canary Wharf (which is London’s financial district) on her part time secondment.
Nona is a member of Persian Women in Tech London Chapter since last summer and helps organise monthly events in the city. She was one of the key member organising our one year anniversary at Google’s headquarters in London last year. She is also part of the planning committee for the inaugural Persian Women in Tech conference on 22 June 2019 in London. Nona assists with the legal and compliance issues which arise in respect of PWIT in the UK.
