2022 Speakers

Dr. Fay Cobb Payton is the Chief Programs Officer at the Kapor Center where she leads its tech ecosystem building strategy. She was a National Science Foundation Program Director where she initiated the CISE Minority Serving Institution Research Expansion Program and worked on several initiatives, such as INCLUDES, Smart Health and Biomedical Research in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Data Science; AI Fairness, Equity, Accountability & Transparency Dear Colleague Letter and others. She received the NSF Director’s Award […]

Dr. Jeremy Waisome is the President of Modern Figures, Inc., a non-profit organization that seeks to elevate the voices of black women and girls in STEM+C through scholarships and speaking engagements. Dr. Waisome received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from the University of Florida. In 2018, she served as the Project Manager for a National Science Foundation Broadening Participation in Computing Alliance, the Institute for African-American Mentoring in Computing Sciences (iAAMCS, pronounced, “I am CS”), where she expanded the organizations […]

Hadiyah Mujhid is the CEO and Founder of HBCUvc, a nonprofit that is dedicated to changing how investment capital is formed and allocated to benefit historically underestimated groups. She has experience as both a tech founder and software engineer and is obsessed with leveraging technology entrepreneurship for economic inclusion. She is also an Echoing Green and Praxis Fellow. Hadiyah earned her MBA from Drexel University and holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, an […]

AFUA BRUCE is a leading public interest technologist who has spent her career working at the intersection of technology, policy, and society. Her work has spanned the government, non-profit, private, and academic sectors, as she has held senior science and technology positions at DataKind, the White House, the FBI, and IBM. Afua is currently a strategy consultant and advisor to organizations developing and expanding public interest tech projects in the corporate, government, and nonprofit spaces. She is an adjunct professor […]

Nicole M. Joseph is an associate professor with tenure of mathematics education in the department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University. She is also the Director of the Joseph Mathematics Education Research Lab (JMEL), an intergenerational lab that focuses on training and mentoring its members on Black Feminist and intersectional epistemological orientations. Using critical perspectives produce theoretical and methodological scholarship that challenges hegemonic notions of objectivity to emphasize more humanizing, empowering, and transformative research. Dr. Joseph’s research explores two […]

Dr. Fallon Wilson strengthens the tech ecosystem nationwide, especially as it relates both to Black women technologists and underrepresented persons of color who may not have access to the ever-changing arena of technology. Her TEDx–Nashville presentation of Stop Ignoring Black Women and Hear of Our Tech Prophecies addresses the intersection of historical reality for Black women, spirituality, and technology. As the Lead Principal Investigator for #BlackTechFutures Research Institute, Wilson’s Institute’s work, funded in part by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation’s […]

Merline Saintil is a Fortune 500 board director and was recently named Lead Director of Rocket Lab, a space exploration company. Her role as lead director of this public company is a distinction that only a handful of Black women hold in the world. She also serves on the board of TD Synnex – a Fortune 50 company and recently IPO boards like GitLab. Before her corporate governance experience as a non-executive director, she was a technology and business executive […]