Join us to see inspirational women battle it out in debates over the topics that fire you up, challenge you and bring us together!
About this Event
Women’s panels are a valuable opportunity to learn from experienced thought leaders who provide varying perspectives. This program takes the traditional women's panel and flips the script. Instead of moderated questions to a panel, two female thought leaders, or “debaters”, will educate and debate specific topics relevant to women in tech and entrepreneurship. Best part - YOU get to vote for the winner. The debates will be followed by a networking hour.
Schedule
2:00 pm - Opening Remarks
2:05 pm - 3:10 pm - Debates from Thought Leaders
3:10 pm - 3:20 pm - Break
3:20 pm - 4:20 pm - Networking
4:20-4:30pm - Closing Remarks
Meet the Debaters
Watch these incredible women go head to head in lively debates!
AI – Rachna Chadha vs Kathy Yacko
Biases - Pamela Raitt vs Aurora Archer
Ethics - Farzaneh Poorjabar vs Julia Anthony
Innovation - Diane Mussio vs Alison Martin
More speakers to be announced for the following topics:
Meet the Moderator
Vanessa Chan is a Penn Professor, Entrepreneur, Board Member, Angel Investor, Key Note Speaker, and Working Mom who with her Hubs is making it all work. She is a leading thinker in innovation & entrepreneurship where she thrives at the interface of technology and business. Her specialty is translating technology assets to meet unmet needs for B2B, B2C & DTC companies. Vanessa is now on her third career, at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is a Professor of Practice in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Undergraduate Chair of the Materials Science Department and a member of the Executive Committee of Penn Health Tech
Vanessa’s journey has been covered in various news outlets including the WSJ, The Washington Post, a best-selling book (I Know How She Does It), CBS and various podcasts including “Women Killing It!”. You also can find her very well received 2018 Penn Engineering Commencement speech at www.failingislikefarting.com.
Vanessa earned a Ph.D. from MIT, a B.S.E from the University of Pennsylvania, both in Materials Science and Engineering and holds three patents. Vanessa is married to Mark van der Helm, the VP of Energy and Facilities Maintenance at Walmart and despite their crazy careers are engaged parents to two school-aged daughters. She is an avid single-track mountain biker, downhill skier and world traveler.
About the Debaters
Alison Martin
Alison Martin is the Founder and CEO of Engage Mentoring, a software company who helps companies attract, retain, and develop their talent through strategic mentoring initiatives.
She also founded the Pass the Torch for Women Foundation in 2013. The Foundation was developed to provide mentoring for women at all stages of their career and their vision is a world of equal opportunities for women in professional environments.
She has two children and volunteers for Girls Inc, Purposeful Women Inc., and serves on the board for the Diversity Roundtable of Central Indiana, an organization dedicated to impacting diversity and inclusion in the workplace. She was nominated for Indianapolis Best and Brightest in 2013 and was recognized with the Indiana Commission for Women’s Torchbearer award in 2014. She is the author of the book, “Learning to Lead Through Mentoring”, published first in 2013 and re-released in 2016, which outlines the 8 lessons one must consider before pursuing a mentoring relationship.
Aurora Archer
Aurora Archer spent 7 years at AstraZeneca where she led the consumer re-launch and growth of a $6.5B stagnant brand and subsequently led both the US and global digital transformation teams driving digital & marketing strategy with an emphasis on social, mobile, content strategy and predictive analytics across Consumer, Provider and Payor segments. Aurora led the team who won the first healthcare campaign to win a Cannes Lions Grand Prix in 2015 for "Take it from a Fish"; was recognized for Leadership in Technology by the Association for Women in Computing, and has been the subject of a cover story in Working Mother magazine. Aurora holds a BA in Psychology from Syracuse University.
Diane Mussio
Diane Mussio is a resourceful and highly organized business team leader who excels at using her natural passion that empowers others to lead with knowledge. As Director of Innovation and Strategic Initiatives at Aramark, Diane leads the development of new initiatives focusing on growth in the Convenience Retailing and Coffee Channels. Prior to joining Aramark, Diane spent numerous years at Campbell Soup Company in a variety of brand management and innovation roles. During her tenure at Wawa corporate, she designed and implemented new product and program initiatives for various foodservice categories. In addition to her “day job” in Corporate America, Diane has maintained a part time side hustle as an adjunct professor, having taught a variety of marketing and management undergraduate classes at local universities for the past 12 years.
Kathy Yacko
Kathy joined Aetna's Tech Research & Innovation team in 2011, developing deep expertise and strategy for the emerging tech domains of AI, Immersive Technologies, Behavioral Analytics, Blockchain, and Internet of Things (IoT). She currently manages the tech-enabled innovation pipeline for CVS Health, inspiring business transformation through vanguard thinking and exploration of the Art of the Possible. With 30+ years' experience in healthcare IT, Katherine has led numerous strategic initiatives, consistently delivering leadership and cultural change in a complex environment. Kathy graduated from Drexel University with a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology and holds a Master of Science in Organizational Dynamics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Farzaneh Poorjabar
Farzaneh is the Director of Security Data Analytics team in Global Security organization. She has a MS in Mathematics and Statistics from the university of Cincinnati (UC) in Ohio. She taught college level math and stat courses for over 20 years at UC. Farzaneh joined Phoenix Data Science (PDS) team at Aetna/CVS Health about 5 years ago, and a year and half ago joined Global Security as Principal Data Scientist and then took over the leadership of the team.
Julia Anthony
Julia Anthony is the Founder & CEO of SOLUtion Medical — a life science company developing more patient friendly drug delivery systems for reconstitutable drugs. Together with its affiliates, SOLUtion has and continues to advance social medical device innovation especially within the adrenal insufficiency sphere. A graduate of West Chester University where she studied Kinesiology and Nutrition, Julia earned her M.S. in Industrial Design from Jefferson University, concentrating in medical device creation and user interaction. Julia actively advocates and educates on behalf of the rare disease community and serves on the Young Adult Advisory Board for the CARES Foundation. As a young woman living with a rare medical condition, Julia brings her experience and rigor as a designer, entrepreneur, healthcare professional and patient to the life sciences.
Nivedita Nelaturi
Nivi has her Master’s in Business Administration and Computer Science. Nivi has 20+ years of experience in IT. Nivi is passionate about Technology, Innovation, incorporating design thinking in all aspects, supporting girls/women in IT. Nivi won first place Phenomenal Women in Technology Award in 2019 for her contributions and engagements that led to cost savings, community engagement and impact within and outside Aetna/CVS. Nivi also established the solution domain lead forum, venue for architecture domain leads to exchange ideas to support the business/customer. Nivi is a member of SIM Philadelphia and American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Nivi volunteers at the girls in STEM events and as a coach for a middle school robotic team.
Pamela Raitt
Pamela is an established leader who has spent the last 25 years helping global brands create meaningful, memorable cross-channel touch-points, helping them establish or reset their brand identity, leading enterprise-level digital initiatives, and fostering human-centric innovation and design thinking practices into her clients’ work, and cultures. Pamela began her career on Madison Avenue and was privileged to work across channels with large consumer brands including Bank of America, Lucky Strike, CVS and Wendy’s. She later spent several years in Silicon Valley where she helped then emergent brands like Microsoft, eBay, Sony, Yahoo! and Charles Schwab create unique, memorable digital engagement strategies for their prospects and customers. She spent seven years overseeing a global experience design team that worked across content strategy, user experience, user interface design and front-end development to bring end-to-end, platform-driven initiatives to global clients including YouTube.
Rachna Chadha
Rachna has decades of experience in providing technology solutions in healthcare.
She is a Software Architect Advisor at CVS Health. In her current role, she provides leadership to software architects, driving them to think out-of-box for innovative solutions. Rachna is also part of the Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence at CVS Health.
Rachna completed her Masters in Computer Science in 2001, and was awarded a gold medal along with an academic scholarship for developing image processing using complex statistical models.
Rachna is passionate about emerging technologies like block-chain and artificial intelligence. In her spare time, Rachna enjoys exploring emerging technologies and prototyping. She strongly believes that technology can enable a healthier society in future.
