Faculty Speakers
Morgan Ames
Assistant Professor of Practice
School of Information
UC Berkeley
Morgan G. Ames researches the ideological origins of inequality in the technology world, with a focus on utopianism, childhood, and learning.
Her book The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (MIT Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Best Information Science Book Award, the 2020 Sally Hacker Prize, and the 2021 Computer History Museum Prize, draws on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Paraguay to explore the cultural history, results, and legacy of the OLPC project — and what it tells us about the many other technology projects that draw on similar utopian ideals.
Morgan is an assistant professor of practice in the School of Information and associate director of research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches in the Master’s in Data Science (MIDS) program and administers the Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies. She is also affiliated with the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group and the Center for Science, Technology, Society and Policy.
Catherine Cronquist Browning
Assistant Vice Provost and Chief of Staff
Division of Undergraduate Education
UC Berkeley
Catherine Cronquist Browning is an educational administrator committed to excellence and equity in higher education. As assistant vice provost and chief of staff in the Division of Undergraduate Education at UC Berkeley, she serves as a senior advisor and thought partner to the vice provost for undergraduate education, manages the VPUE’s immediate office, and works closely with senior staff and academic leaders across the campus, with a focus on key institutional initiatives that span organizational boundaries. Browning has experience across a wide range of student services and academic planning areas, including higher education policy, strategic planning, curriculum management, student advising and wellness, fellowships, academic student employee hiring, diversity and inclusion, and program evaluation. For many years, Browning supported graduate students in the information and data sciences and she is strongly committed to embedding considerations of ethics, social context, and fairness in the teaching of computing and data science.
Browning first came to Berkeley in 2005 as a graduate student and holds a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley and a Certificate in Student Affairs and Higher Education Administration from UC Berkeley Extension. Previously, Browning was the assistant dean of academic programs, equity, and inclusion for the UC Berkeley School of Information (I School), and oversaw four graduate degree programs in the information and data sciences, strategic planning for equity and inclusion, and student services. Her achievements at the I School include contributing to the development of two new online degree programs, authoring the school’s first Equity & Inclusion strategic plan, founding its DEIBJ working group, and establishing the I School Graduate Scholars fellowship and mentoring program. Browning also served briefly as assistant dean of educational programs and new initiatives for the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. In an earlier role as a teaching consultant in the UC Berkeley Graduate Division, Browning coordinated the How Students Learn initiative, which collected and disseminated research-based teaching and learning practices from UC Berkeley faculty across a wide variety of disciplines.
Shawna Dark
Chief Academic Technology Officer
Assistant Vice Provost
Division of Undergraduate Education
UC Berkeley
Shawna Dark has worked in higher education for over 20 years as a tenured faculty member, department chair, and now in administration.
She currently serves UC Berkeley as the Assistant Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Chief Academic Technology Officer. She oversees a unit called Research, Teaching, and Learning. As part of the Division of Undergraduate Education, RTL partners with the campus to inspire, enrich, and innovate Berkeley’s collective practice and pursuit of inclusive teaching and research excellence.
Erin Hartman
Assistant Professor of Political Science
UC Berkeley
Erin Hartman is an assistant professor of political science at UC Berkeley. Her research sits at the intersection of the social sciences and statistics. Her mission is to create a body of research that bridges these two worlds — with an emphasis on answering causal questions — within which experts from both worlds can have dialogue with one another and foster beneficial collaborations.
Her research sits primarily in the field of causal inference and survey design and analysis. Her main research agendas focus on external validity of experiments, falsification testing, and survey weighting.
Marti Hearst
Professor and Interim Dean
School of Information
UC Berkeley
Dr. Marti Hearst is interim dean and a professor in the School of Information and the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. Her primary research interests are user interfaces for search engines, information visualization, natural language processing, and improving MOOCs. She wrote the first book on search user interfaces.
Prof. Hearst was named an ACL fellow in 2022, a fellow of the ACM in 2013, a member of the CHI Academy in 2017, and has received an NSF CAREER award, an IBM Faculty Award, two Google Research Awards, an Okawa Foundation Fellowship, four Excellence in Teaching Awards, and has been principal investigator for more than $3.5M in research grants.
Prof. Hearst has served as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). She has served on the advisory council of NSF’s CISE Directorate, on the web board for CACM, as a member of the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary, and on the Edge.org panel of experts. She is on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) and was formerly on the boards of ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), Computational Linguistics, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), and IEEE Intelligent Systems.
Prof. Hearst received BA, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley, and she was a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC from 1994 to 1997.
Joyce Shen
WiDS Berkeley Conference Chair
Continuing Lecturer
School of Information, UC Berkeley
Industry Speakers
Joana Carrasqueira
Head of Community for Developer Relations, AI & Machine Learning
Joana Carrasqueira is a developer relations lead for AI/ML at Google and her mission is to empower individuals and organizations to harness the power of AI to address real-world challenges. She is a business leader with a track record of bringing strategic vision and global cross-functional programs to life. She’s also the creator of Google’s Women in ML program and flagship symposium, a pioneering initiative that has equipped thousands of developers with knowledge and skills in AI/ML.
Prior to Google, she worked at the Silicon Valley Innovation Center on Innovation consulting for Forbes 500, startups, and venture capital firms. Served as education manager at the International Pharmaceutical Federation, working closely with WHO, UNESCO, the United Nations and started her career at the Portuguese Pharmaceutical Society.
June Dershewitz
Data Strategist
Amazon Music
June Dershewitz is an analytics leader with 25 years of experience as a practitioner and as a consultant for major brands. She has spent the past 8 years working in the Media & Entertainment division of a well-known tech company, where she has built and led teams of analysts, scientists, and data engineers. She holds nonprofit and academic board seats, and she is an angel investor in data startups. She lives with her family in San Francisco.
Jasmine Jaksic
Senior Engineering Director
Nvidia
Jasmine Jaksic is a senior engineering director at NVIDIA, where she leads IT product development and management. Previously, she worked at Google, Stripe and SambaNova where she was instrumental in building and launching several pioneering products and technologies. She is a founding member of Istio, the leading open-source service mesh that helps organizations run distributed, microservices-based applications anywhere. She co-founded Posture Monitor, an application for posture correction that won Intel’s innovation award. She is also a contributing writer for The New York Times, Wired, NPR, Huffington Post, Newsweek and InfoQ. She is the author of “Life of a Silicon Valley Hipster” — a parody of all things Silicon Valley.
Ashley Oldacre
Program Manager, Google AI Developer Relations
Host, “People of AI” Podcast
Ashley Oldacre is a program manager on the AI Developer Relations team at Google and host of the People of AI podcast. She is dedicated to building community engagement and educational programs to connect and inspire professionals within the field of AI to collaborate, grow and create impact together.
Before Google, Ashley began her career in China building community programs. She worked with the Swiss Development Agency to revive the historical community of Shaxi, Yunnan province before becoming the lead program manager for one of China’s biggest educational companies launching a national theater program for 5000 students. Ashley holds a degree in East Asian studies and Public Policy from Connecticut College.
Rachel Reinitz
IBM Fellow
Rachel Reinitz is a distinguished IBM Fellow, Vice President, and CTO of IBM Americas Client Engineering, recognized as one of the 335 IBM Fellows appointed over six decades. She pioneered the IBM Garage, a co-creation, multi-disciplinary innovation model, now used by over 50,000 IBMers. Leading Generative AI pilots, Rachel validates client use cases and proves the capabilities of IBM’s generative AI platform, watsonx, sharing her insights at conferences and in blogs. Through her innovative methodology and leadership, Rachel has significantly influenced how clients embrace and apply new technologies, fostering a culture of innovation within organizations.
Anna Sackmann
Data Services Librarian
UC Berkeley Library
Anna is the data services librarian at the UC Berkeley Library. In this role, Anna oversees the library data services program, which guides scholars to discover, access, share, and preserve data through dataset acquisition, discovery and librarian-led instruction and consultations. She collaborates closely with librarians and other data focused campus organizations in order to provide holistic data support for researchers, faculty, and students.
Erin Smith
Head of Design and Analytics
Core GTM Products: Revenue Strategy and Operations
Erin Smith is a product lead manager for a small and medium business sales program at Google. With 10 years of experience, she has driven business growth and cost efficiencies through data and technology innovations in the AdTech and Education sectors. Erin is most energized when she can cultivate tech-led transformations in mission-driven developing companies. She earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology and organizational studies from the University of Michigan and is currently a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley’s Master of Information and Data Science program.
Brittney Vierra
Associate Director of Data Science
Recursion Pharmaceuticals
Brittney Vierra (MIDS ’21) is a data science professional with a multi-faceted background in physics and data science, and experience of innovation in the biotech space. She seeks to advance drug discovery and improve treatments’ time-to-market via complex biological modeling and machine learning implementations. As an associate director of data science at Recursion Pharmaceuticals she leads cross-functional teams of data scientists and engineers working to build industrialized and autonomous process for early-stage drug discovery programs which leverage a variety of cutting-edge ML and AI methods including large language models for drug discovery and active learning. Brittney is also an active partner with Women in Data Science, Women in Physics, and local Utah based organizations, such as Tech-Moms, to support, mentor, and advocate for women in STEM.
May Wang
CTO, IoT Security
Palo Alto Networks
Dr. May Wang is the CTO of IoT Security at Palo Alto Networks, a multinational cybersecurity company. She is leading AI initiatives across multiple security domains.
She co-founded Zingbox which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2019 for its AI-based IoT security solutions.
Dr. Wang holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University. She received numerous awards, including the prestigious 2023 Women in AI Entrepreneur award from VentureBeat.
