Featured Speaker(s)

Hillary Mickell, Moderator

Hillary Mickell is the Dean and Regional CEO of Northeastern University. She is an accomplished business leader, tech entrepreneur, angel investor and board member and has led companies from inception to hyper growth. Hillary has held management positions at Microsoft and Yahoo!, was a founding executive at Shutterfly and co-founder of Silicon Valley startup FOODILY.

Rehgan Avon, Panelist

Rehgan Avon is the co-founder & principal of Ikonos Analytics, a solutions company that provides organizations with the architecture and framework to advance their analytical capabilities through aligned and incremental improvements. With a background in integrated systems engineering and a strong focus on analytical technology, Rehgan has worked on architecting solutions and products around operationalizing machine learning models at scale within the large enterprise. Rehgan's previous experience has been fueled by a passion for early-stage startups and product development, holding positions as Head of Solutions at Mobikit, Solutions Architect at ModelOp, and Lead Data Engineer at Clarivoy. She also teaches courses in python, data science, and web development at MBA programs nationally through an education startup company, Cognitir.

She is the founder and CEO of Women in Analytics, an organization that increases visibility to women making an impact in the analytics space by providing a platform for women to lead the conversations around the advancements of analytical research, development, and applications. She remains active and involved in fostering collaboration around emerging analytical methods and technologies. She is also the recipient of Columbus CEO's Future 50 award.

Kate Schultz, Panelist

Kate Schultz (she/her) is an early career data scientist on the Modeling & Simulation Team in the Computational Biology Group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. She conducts research and develops software to advance computational capabilities in areas including in silico drug discovery, chemical space analysis, and computational metabolomics. She has collaborated with groups in government and academia on past and ongoing projects. Based in Seattle, she holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Washington and an M.S. in Computer Science from Northeastern University's Align Program.

Jodi Tims, Panelist

Jodi Tims is the Executive Director of Khoury College in the Global Network and Professor of the Practice at Northeastern's San Francisco/Silicon Valley campuses. She currently serves as Chair of the Association of Computing Machinery's Committee on Women in Computing.

She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in programming languages. In her role at ACM-W, her emphasis has been to grow the organization globally. Dr. Tims is a member of numerous women in computing advisory councils including NCWIT and CRA-WP. She has been an active member of regional education/industry collaborations and currently serves in an advisory capacity to the Regional Information Technology Engagement (RITE) Board of Northeast Ohio. She is also an active member of ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education, currently serving as Sponsor Liaison to the annual SIGCSE symposium.