Philly Tech Week 2018

Commitment to community and hunger for challenge have lured Keenan up and down the East Coast for most of her life. Her professional journey has taken her from the classrooms of Duke University to a Department of Defense Counterterrorism Center in Washington D.C. to the wild places of the Mid-Atlantic, where she led both outdoor expeditions and fundraising campaigns for Outward Bound. Now, as Venture for America’s Director of Philadelphia, Keenan supports the local talent pipeline by bringing the next generation of entrepreneurs to Philly to work for startups and get the skills and resources they need to one day start companies of their own.

Shelly Bell is the founder of Black Girl Ventures (BGV), a social enterprise dedicated to finding creative place-based solutions to dissolve the race and gender gap in access to capital. She is the Google Digital Coach for DC - named Entrepreneur of the Year 2017 by Technically DC and one of the Top 40 New Power Women in Tech by DCA Live (2017). She is among the nation's most sought community organizers, motivational speakers and hosts in the Washington, DC Metro area. With a background is performance poetry, K-12 education and Computer Science she vibrates her passion for community building by helping people amplify their power to live the best life possible on their own terms!

Maya Baratz is the Managing Director of Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs Accelerator, Powered by Techstars, through which she actively invests in media and connectivity companies. Maya is a longtime startup advisor and a recent Harvard University Nieman Fellow with a deep footing in and passion for consumer products. She has led the strategy and development of new-to-market digital products and revenue streams, most recently as the Head of New Products at Disney/ABC Television and, prior to that, as a product and media executive for companies including The Wall Street Journal, MTV, Flickr and Monster.com. Maya has also written extensively about technology and startups for publications including Fortune, Fast Company, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. And she has created and led a product development course at institutions including Columbia Business School and General Assembly.

Wendell Potter is an author, former corporate public relations executive and founder of Philadelphia-based Tarbell.org, a new journalism nonprofit. Wendell was a newspaper reporter in his first career and covered business and politics in Tennessee before joining Scripps-Howard’s Washington bureau to cover Congress, the White House and Supreme Court. In his post-journalism career, he served as head of corporate communications for two of the country’s largest health insurers, Humana (1989-1993) and Cigna (1993-2008). Since leaving the corporate world Wendell has returned to journalism and currently serves as Tarbell.org’s executive director. He also has written three books: Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans (a New York Times bestseller and winner of the 2011 Ridenhour Book Prize); Obamacare: What’s in It for Me: What Everyone Needs to Know about the Affordable Care Act; and Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy and What We Can Do About It.

Natalie J. Egan (she / her / hers) is an openly transgender B2B software entrepreneur. As CEO and founder of Translator, she is on a mission to scale empathy and equality through technology. Natalie has over 20 years of experience driving digital change, developing high performing teams, building complex products, and selling enterprise solutions. Prior to founding Translator in 2016 - and prior to her transition - Natalie was CEO and founder of PeopleLinx, a venture capital backed social selling technology solution that was acquired by a leading sales acceleration company. In addition to her entrepreneurial pursuits, Natalie has also worked in leadership positions at LinkedIn, Autonomy, and Ecolab. Based in New York City, Natalie is a graduate of Cornell University and The Villanova School of Business and is currently writing her first book about her transition from male to female CEO and the business lessons learned along the way.

"Recognized by the White House as a Champion of Change and a Forbes Under 30 Honoree in Law and Policy. For over a decade, Jamira has made it her mission to employ her personal experiences as the driving force to improve the lives of others. From implementing anti-violence programs throughout Philadelphia – when she was just a high school student, to organizing youth trainings around the world – in collaboration with the United Nations. Jamira ardor for personal and social advancement is undeniable; she leads with marked expertise on youth engagement, education reform, global citizenship, gun violence prevention and criminal justice reform.

Currently, Jamira is the Head of Youth Engagement and Skills for the Global Business Coalition for Education, helping to ensure a collaborative relationship between youth and business leaders; to enable innovative ways to educate, engage and activate young people around the world. Prior to the Global Business Coalition for Education, Jamira worked as the National Deputy Millennial Vote Director at Hillary For America and before that, she managed the gun violence and criminal justice portfolios at Amnesty International USA—one of the first and largest human rights organizations in the world. Jamira also consult with a number of public and private entities on how to authentically engage impacted communities. Working at the intersection of policy, community and social good, Jamira provides unique insight that will help actualize the change we all so desperately need."

Tonya Adams, a Comcast employee for over 16 years, currently manages a team of network engineers that supports Comcast Business Enterprise Ethernet services nationwide. Ms. Adams has developed a reputation for strong and engaging leadership both inside and outside of cable. She began her career as a network engineer before becoming a voice engineer where she helped launch Comcast’s first digital voice services offering and going on to support and lead strategic planning on various other projects and products. Outside of work, Ms. Adams is a proud and active member of her community with membership inWICT, NAMIC, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated, Upsilon Delta Omega, and served as a former youth leader for her church, as well as several other community and professional organizations.

Dr. Sezgin Ayabakan is an assistant professor in the Management Information Systems Department at Temple University’s Fox School of Business.

He is currently teaching Data Science course at the Fox School of Business and previously taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Information Systems and Predictive Analytics at the University of Baltimore and UT-Dallas.

His research interests lie primarily in two areas. The first involves Business Analytics with a focus on healthcare analytics. The second involves the business value of information technologies. Both areas investigate the managerial implications of information technology implementation decisions at healthcare or manufacturing organizations and contain a major analytics or empirical component. He is currently working on a healthcare project that involves analysis of over 500K patient admission records from 68 hospitals in the North Texas region and another project on the state of Maryland’s entire inpatient and outpatient admission claims’ records for the fiscal years of 2013 – 2017 (~5.4M records). He has published papers in MIS Quarterly and won the best conference paper runner-up award at the 2014 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), Auckland, New Zealand.

Ayabakan graduated from the University of Texas at Dallas, where he earned a PhD in Management Science, with an emphasis on MIS. He received a Master of Science degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Florida, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Turkey’s Bilkent University.