Panelists drawn from the nonprofit and academic sectors will talk about their own experiences building grass roots programs providing women and minorities with technology sector opportunities. In addition to highlighting models of inclusion that show promise, panelists will reflect on what it takes to replicate or scale these approaches.
Akeem is the Programs Director at The Hidden Genius Project, board chair of The Lorenzo Alexander ACES foundation, and founder of (@Corporately). Akeem’s passion is embedded at the intersections of technology & business, law & policy, and empowering youth with confidence and a skill set to build technical solutions to solve problems specific to their own communities.
As a result of his own personal experiences growing up and navigating through underrepresented communities, Akeem’s is known to be unrelenting and unapologetic with respect to creating access and opportunities for historically underserved demographics.
Akeem’s previous professional experience is in law where he served as a Senior Corporate Paralegal overseeing new business venture’s intellectual property, contracts, and compliance matters. Akeem was educated at the University of California, Riverside where he studied public policy and religion.
Patricia Garcia is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. She conducts interdisciplinary action research on race, gender, and technology with a special interest in promoting equitable and culturally responsive STEM programming for girls of color. Her current work focuses on broadening participation in computing by developing a low-resource model for teaching computational thinking skills in informal learning environments such a libraries. Her work is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). She holds a Ph.D. in Information Studies from the iSchool at UCLA.
Linda J. Sax is Professor of Higher Education in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at UCLA. She received her B.A. in political economy from UC Berkeley, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in higher education from UCLA. For over a decade, Dr. Sax served as director of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) and Associate Director of the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, where she oversaw nationwide surveys of college students and faculty.
Dr. Sax’s research focuses on gender differences in college student development, with an emphasis on women in STEM fields. Dr. Sax has generated over $5 million in research funding and is currently Principal Investigator for BRAID Research, a national, longitudinal study of gender and racial/ethnic diversity in undergraduate computer science, funded by the National Science Foundation, the Anita Borg Institute, the Computing Research Association, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Intel.
Dr. Sax was selected as a 2007-2008 Fellow for the Sudikoff Family Institute for Education & New Media. She is also the recipient of the 2005 Scholar-in-Residence Award from the American Association of University Women and the 1999 Early Career Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education.
Dr. Sax has authored over 100 publications including The Gender Gap in College: Maximizing the Developmental Potential of Women and Men, as well as several book chapters, monographs, and articles in journals such as Research in Higher Education, The Review of Higher Education, The Journal of Higher Education, The Journal of College Student Development, and The Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering. She has served on the editorial boards for The Review of Higher Education and Research in Higher Education and is a trustee of Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles.
Selena Robinson is a second-year, full-time MBA student at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. Prior to joining the MBA program, she worked in the defense industry as a member of Lockheed Martin’s Communications Leadership Development Program. After leaving Lockheed, she developed a congressionally recognized program to help women exit poverty in Northeast Georgia.
She earned her A.B.J. from the University of Georgia with a concentration in public relations, graduating Summa Cum Laude, with First Honors, in addition to earning a Fulbright Scholarship.