Featured Speaker(s)

Moderator:

Vicki Donlan is publisher and founder of Women's Business Boston, a 25,000 controlled-circulation newspaper devoted to women in business in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island region. She is a regular guest discussing women in business on New England Cable News' Business Day.

Donlan was the first Executive Director of The Commonwealth Institute, a nonprofit organization founded by twelve prominent Boston women CEOs to assist women entrepreneurs in the growth of their businesses. As co-founder and first Exectuive Director of the South Shore Women's Business Network and founder of The Alliance of Women's Business and Professional Organizations, Donlan has been instrumental in the growth of networking for women entrepreneurs and corporate leaders.

She is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including the U.S. Small Business Administration's Massachusets and New England Women in Business Advocate Award for 1994, the South Shore Women's Business Network's Women Mean Business Award, the Boston YWCA's Women of Achievement Class of 1999, and the Massachusetts Women's Political Caucus' Abigail Adams Award as an outstanding woman.

Speakers:

Helen Greiner is Chairman and Co-founder of iRobot Corporation. Under Ms. Greiner's leadership, iRobot Corporation is delivering robots into the industrial, consumer, academic, and military markets. Recently, she was named the Ernst and Young New England Entrepreneur of the Year® for 2003 (with iRobot co-founder Colin Angle). Selected from entrants across New England, she was cited for her experience, expertise and innovation. She has also been honored as a Technology Review Magazine "Innovator for the Next Century," invited to the World Economic Forums as a Global Leader of Tomorrow, and has been awarded the prestigious DEMO God Award at the DEMO Conference. Her 15 years of experience in robotic technology includes work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and an M.S. in Computer Science, both from MIT.

Miriam Kadansky is currently the Manager of the Systems Technologies Hub at Sun Microsystems Laboratories in Burlington. In her seven years at Sun Labs, Miriam has worked in several research groups. Her major work has been in the Network Scalability & Performance group, where she developed innovative routing algorithms, and was Principal Investigator for the Java Reliable Multicast Service®, a toolkit for building reliable multicast applications utilizing a variety of transport protocols. Prior to Sun, Miriam held several engineering positions at Xyplex, a manufacturer of terminal server, bridges, routers, and switches, as well as Jupiter Technology, Interactive Data Corporation, and Distribution Management Systems. Miriam has a B.A. in Mathematics from Harvard College, and is currently pursuing an MLS degree at Simmons' Graduate School of Library Science. She has published numerous papers on networking algorithms, and is an inventor on thirteen US patents.

Sharon Mullen is the founder of Inventive Parent, a company she founded in 2000 after recognizing a need for inventive children's products and realizing that the existing products did not answer many parents' or children's needs. Her first invention came after her son was born and she found that attachable blankets did not exist for baby carriers and car seats for children over one year old. She then created her own design for a blanket that attaches to car seats, joggers and bike seats called the Original Car Seat Cozy. After visiting an international showcase of baby products, she became convinced that the best child products were invented by parents not corporations. She proceeded to create an online store to carry her own products as well as products created by other parents. In February 2002, she was the recipient of a $10,000 grant from Balance Oasis for oustanding female entrepreneurs.