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Opening Speaker

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Renita Miller, Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer, The Wharton School

Renita Miller is the inaugural Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer for the Wharton School at The University of Pennsylvania. In this new role and as a member of Wharton’s senior leadership team, Renita is responsible for leading and developing the comprehensive diversity, equity, and inclusion strategic plans, partnerships, programs, and initiatives for the faculty, staff, students, and alumni of the Wharton community. She works closely with the school’s leadership to integrate inclusive practices into the core academic and co-curricular activities of the school, including admissions, recruitment, faculty hiring and retention, curriculum development, training and development, and programming.

VC/Startup Mentorship Panel

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Julia Maltby, Principal at Flybridge Capital

Julia Maltby is a Principal at Flybridge Capital, an early-stage VC firm investing in pre-seed, seed, and series A technology companies. She focuses on real estate, supply chain, construction, climate, and SMB tooling. She also runs a pre-seed fund - Deco Ventures - that invests in the the "built world" as well as serving as a GP for The MBA Fund.

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Prior to Flybridge, Julia was the Director of Business Development at WeWork, an early stage investor at Underscore Ventures, and a founding team member at Plum Alley. She holds an MBA from Wharton, and a degree in Architecture and Urban Studies from Vassar College.
 

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Serena Advani, Founder of Seadrop Skincare

Serena is the founder of Seadrop Skincare, a first-of-its-kind, crushable, "just-add-water" skincare tablet that activates into a hydrating facial cleanser upon use with the tap water you already have at home. While traditional liquid cleanser is ~90% water and stored in single-use plastic, our waterless cleanser comes in zero-waste, refillable packaging for skincare that’s cleaner for both the planet and your skin.

 

Serena holds degrees in cognitive neuroscience and operations (with a focus on neuromarketing) from Penn, along with an MBA from Wharton (where she served as a President of the Wharton Beauty Club). She previously worked on beauty due diligences at McKinsey and in global brand strategy at Estee Lauder Companies (Bobbi Brown), and she has recently been named a 2023 Most Influential ESG Leader by Women's Wear Daily.

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Katherine Chen, Director of Amazon Corporate Development

Katherine Chen is a Director on Amazon’s Corporate Development team currenting acting as Technical Advisor to the head of Corporate and Business Development. She has been at Amazon for 6 years and held a number of transactional roles working on acquisitions, investments, and strategic partnerships, as well as founding and leading the Industrial Innovation Fund.

 

Prior to Amazon, Katherine was Chief Investment Officer at Alignment Artist Capital, a Principal at Pilot Group, and an investment banker at Bank of America and Moelis & Company. Katherine graduated with honors with a B.S. in Finance and Accounting from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

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Ita Ekpoudom, Partner at GingerBread Capital

Ita’s mission is to engage, educate, and elevate the next generation of successful women business leaders and investors. As the Founder & CEO of Tigress Ventures, an advisory and consulting firm she started in 2014, Ita tapped her considerable network to bring together visionary entrepreneurs with seasoned professionals to help women scale their businesses and hone their leadership skills. Tigress Ventures hosted a monthly speakers series featuring thought leaders and industry experts and provided private consultations with individual clients.  
Ita also served as Venture Partner at Plum Alley Investments, where she oversaw investment opportunities and pipeline for high-growth female-founded and gender-diverse startups.
Previously, Ita held product management roles at TravelClick and American Express. She began her career at Goldman Sachs as an analyst in Credit Capital Markets and then as an institutional trader of preferred stock.
Ita holds an MBA in Marketing and Entrepreneurial Management from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; and earned a Bachelor’s degree cum laude in Psychology, with a certificate in Finance, from Princeton University.  She is also a Kauffman Fellow.

Self Advocacy Panel

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Alex Hellmuth, BCG Business Management Senior Director

Alex Hellmuth leads BCG’s Philadelphia office as the Business Management Senior Director. In her role, she oversees all people topics, including our diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy, and operations for the office.

 

Prior to this role, she was a Principal at BCG. Before her tenure at BCG, she was a Princeton in Africa fellow working on corporate sustainability strategies for a multi-national agriculture company in Ghana, and she worked at the Center for American Progress researching and developing advocacy campaigns focused on conflicts in Central and East Africa. She earned her undergraduate degree from Notre Dame and her MBA from the Yale School of Management.

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Dannie Lynn Fountain, Disability Accommodations Program Manager at Google

Dannie Lynn Fountain is a multipassionate human - by day, she’s a Disability Accommodations Program Manager at Google and by night she supports clients and brands with HR-focused diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies. Her focus is on expanding disability inclusion within DEIB efforts by equipping people with the tools to craft change within their own situations, regardless of their seniority at work or authority within their team.

 

Dannie Lynn has been interviewed or quoted in the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Bustle, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Cosmopolitan, Digiday, The Everygirl, Girlboss, and more. Dannie Lynn’s latest book, Ending Checkbox Diversity: Rewriting the Story of Performative Allyship in Corporate America, was a #1 Amazon new release and is available everywhere you buy books.

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Natalie Neilson Edwards, National Grid, Chief Diversity Officer

Natalie Neilson Edwards is an inclusion executive, online educator, and entrepreneur dedicated to leveling the playing field and helping others be their best in the workplace. Named a Top 15 Chief Diversity Officer, Edwards has led DEI efforts across sectors, including education, retail & cosmetics, government, and energy. In her off hours, she educates her social media audience of over 100,000 on how to thrive in the workplace, particularly as members of underrepresented groups.

 

She is a proud graduate of the Wharton School and Howard university.

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Sarah Groom, Director of Warrant + Derivative Investments at Amazon

Sarah Groom serves as the Director of Warrant + Derivative Investments at Amazon, where she uses innovative investment strategies to capture outsized value creation across Amazon’s portfolio of commercial partners. With an expansive background across financial services and tech, Sarah brings 20 years of experience in product development, strategy, and business development.

 

She holds an MBA from Duke University and a BA from American University. 

Negotiation Workshop

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Dr. Sharon Ravitch, Professor of Practice at Upenn

Dr. Sharon Ravitch is a world-renowned scholar and applied methodologist who advises leaders, governments, and non-governmental entities (e.g., UN and WHO) on cultural and inclusive excellence and adaptive leadership for equity.

 

Ravitch has published 8 books on leadership and research, is a GIAN Scholar of the Government of India, a Fulbright Scholar, and a SCoPE Fellow in Social Impact at Anant National University in Ahmedabad, India. Ravitch teaches leaders around the world and approaches women’s leadership development through an intersectional approach.

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Dr.Reima Shakeir, CEO of Women in Innovation. 

Dr. Reima Shakeir is an internationally recognized scholar, author, and consultant with expertise in communications, interpreting power dynamics within organizational systems (advises for example UN, WHO). She has worked in five countries and across different sectors the arts, health, education, and entrepreneurship sectors.

 

She has also coached entrepreneurs and executives for over 15 years, and her work has informed the strategic roadmaps and operating models for several organizations. Reima is also the CEO of Women in Innovation. 

Closing Speaker

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Pooja Kumar, Senior Partner, McKinsey

A physician by training, Pooja has spent the last 15 years working with healthcare systems, medical groups, payers, states, and foundations to materially improve performance and outcomes. She leads McKinsey’s public health domain and work with academic health systems in the United States. She is also a global leader for the McKinsey Health Institute, a not-for-profit entity within the firm that aspires to catalyze action to add a collective 45 billion years of higher-quality life for all people around the world.

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Pooja sits on the board of directors of Last Mile Health, a leading not-for-profit focused on expanding the community-health-worker model to the more than one billion people worldwide who lack access to healthcare because of distance. Prior to McKinsey, Pooja worked extensively in refugee health across Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

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