Diversity Luncheon: Panel - Karen Holtzblatt, Moderator
Channel: Cloud Foundry
Date: 12/07/2017

Diversity Luncheon: Panel - Karen Holtzblatt, Moderator

Karen Holtzblatt, PhD, Founder of Women in Tech Retention Project, CEO of InContext Design; Cornelia Davis, Senior Director of Technology, Pivotal; Dr. Kyla McMullen, Assistant Professor, University of Florida; Kim Bannerman, Google

About Karen Holtzblatt
Karen Holtzblatt is the founder of the Women in Tech Retention Project and creator of the @Work Action Framework for understanding women’s experience at work and interventions to help companies and individuals. She is also the co-founder and CEO of InContext Design and the visionary behind InContext’s unique customer-centered design approach, Contextual Design. Karen has been recognized as a leader in requirements and design for pioneering transformative ideas and design approaches throughout her career.

Karen holds a doctorate in applied psychology from the University of Toronto, is the author of Contextual Design 2nd Edition Design for Life, and has received numerous accolades for her work, including the CHI Academy Lifetime Award for Practice and honors from the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI). She is a research scientist at the University of Maryland.

About Cornelia Davis
Cornelia Davis is Sr. Director of Technology at Pivotal, where she works on the technology strategy for both Pivotal and for Pivotal customers. Through engagement across Pivotal’s broad customer base, Cornelia develops core cloud platform strategies that drive significant change in enterprise organizations, and influence the Pivotal Cloud Foundry evolution. Currently she is focused on extending the platform capabilities from the application tier all the way through to the data layers. She is an industry veteran with almost three decades of experience in image processing, scientific visualization, distributed systems and web application architectures, and cloud-native platforms.When not doing those things you can find her on the yoga mat or in the kitchen.

About Kyla A. McMullen, PhD
Dr. Kyla McMullen earned her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where she was also a Meyerhoff Scholar. She earned her Masters and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan (2007-2012). While earning her Ph.D. she was also a faculty member at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. At Wayne State University she taught computer literacy courses to over 2,000 students. Professor McMullen is the first underrepresented woman to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan. She is currently a tenure-track faculty member at the University of Florida’s Computer & Information Sciences & Engineering Department. Dr. McMullen has a personal commitment to encouraging women and minorities to pursue careers in computing and other STEM fields. She is the creator of "Beautiful, Black, and Brainy" and "Brilliant is the New Black", which showcase hundreds of exceptional young African Americans who excel in STEM fields and don't fit the typical "scientist" stereotype. 

Dr. McMullen is the leader of the SoundPAD Laboratory at the University of Florida, which focuses on the Perception, Application, and Development of 3D audio in various contexts. Current projects include (1) psychoacoustic analysis of the quality of customized head-related transfer functions, (2) using 3D audio to sonify positional data for situational awareness, (3) using virtual spatial audio to augment assistive technology for persons with visual impairments, (4) discovering critical interface design techniques for developing virtual auditory environments, and (5) using 3D audio to increase immersion and realness in virtual and augmented reality.

About Kim Bannerman
Kim has over a decade of experience in the tech industry leading diverse teams and working with enterprise customers. She is passionate about the people behind the technology, especially in the open source community. For the past six years, she has transformed her love of learning and community into organizing multiple user groups. In addition to founding the Seattle Cloud Foundry Meetup and the Seattle Chapter of the Startup Chicks Foundation, Kim serves as a Cloud Foundry Ambassador. Her interest in cloud technologies is longstanding, evidenced by her roles as Director of Cloud Evangelism at CenturyLink and Program Director of Technical Advocacy at IBM BlueBox, where she focused in part on Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes and OpenStack. Most recently, Kim joined Google as a Program Manager for Developer Relations where she runs worldwide technical advocacy programs focused on enterprise and Global 1000 users for Google Cloud Platform. You can follow her on twitter at @kmbannerman.