Our #GHC17 Main Stage Speakers

Today, we are proud to announce our main stage speakers for the 2017 Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC). These keynote speakers are dedicated to supporting women, breaking down gender barriers, and creating change within the tech industry. Their stories are certainly inspiring, and we are excited to hear them speak at #GHC17!

One of our keynotes will be Dr. Ayanna Howard, a professor and the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Endowed Chair in Bioengineering in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2013, Ayanna founded Zyrobotics, which creates therapy and educational products for children with differing needs. Her many accomplishments have been highlighted through a number of articles and awards, including the 2014 A. Richard Newton Educator ABIE Award.

Debbie Sterling, the Founder and CEO of GoldieBlox, is another GHC 17 keynote speaker. GoldieBlox is an award-winning children’s multimedia company which challenges gender stereotypes with the world’s first girl engineer character. In 2015, Debbie was inducted as a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship and honored by the National Women’s History Museum with a “Living Legacy” Award for her work to empower girls around the world.

Melinda Gates will also be on our main stage. As co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Melinda works to transform communities and empower women to help them realize their full potential. She recently launched an executive office, Pivotal Ventures, to bring together the different strands of her advocacy and philanthropic work and create meaningful change.

Our fourth keynote speaker is Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Professor and Director of Stanford University’s AI Lab, and the Chief Scientist at Google Cloud AI/ML. Fei-Fei is the inventor of ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, a critical large-scale dataset and benchmarking effort that has contributed to the latest developments in deep learning and AI. She is also the co-founder of Stanford’s renowned SAILORS outreach program for high school girls.

There’s also Maureen Fan, CEO and co-founder of Baobab Studios, the industry’s leading VR animation studio. Started in 2015, the company’s Emmy-award winning VR animation, “INVASION!,” launched to substantial critical acclaim and became the top performing VR app. She was most recently vice president of games at Zynga, and has worked on films such as “Toy Story 3” and “The Dam Keeper.”

The sixth of our keynote speakers is Dr. Deborah Berebichez, a physicist, TV host, and data scientist. She is the first Mexican woman to graduate with a physics Ph.D. from Stanford University. Deborah is the co-host of Discovery Channel’s “Outrageous Acts of Science” TV show (2012 – present) where she uses her physics background to explain the science behind extraordinary engineering feats. She is is currently the Chief Data Scientist at Metis in New York.

And we will be welcoming keynote speaker Mary Spio to our main stage. Mary has created technologies and content solutions used by global titans such as Lucas Films and Universal Music. She is CEO and President of CEEK VR INC, which recently won the prestigious Silver CLIO award for its Virtual Reality Experience with Universal Music. Mary is also the author of “It’s Not Rocket Science: 7 Game-Changing Traits for Achieving Uncommon Success” (Penguin Books), in which she shares inspirational stories to spur readers to move beyond their comfort zones into creating impact and significance.

We look forward to hearing from all our main stage speakers at GHC 17!