Video
Biographies
Host: Guru Madhavan, Future Leaders Forum Chair and Co-Curator – Program Director, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Guru Madhavan is a biomedical engineer and senior policy adviser. He is a program director at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington, DC. He is a vice-president and member of the board of directors of IEEE-USA. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, and an M.B.A. from the State University of New York. Among numerous awards and honors, he has been named as a distinguished young scientist by the World Economic Forum. He has co-edited six books, worked on numerous policy reports, and recently, the author of Applied Minds: How Engineers Think (W.W. Norton) that has been translated into many languages.
Photo by Diana Lewkowicz
Speakers:
Lisette Titre-Montgomery, Video Game Developer
Lisette Titre-Montgomery is a video game developer with over fourteen years of industry experience. Her artistic skills include special effects, character modeling, and texture painting. In addition, she has also managed global art teams in Japan, China, Australia, India, and the Philippines. Lisette has contributed to some of the industry’s highest profile games, including Tiger Woods Golf, The Simpsons, Dante’s Inferno, Dance Central 3, SIMS 4, and Transformers Age Of Extinction for Android and iOS. Her most recent project is with Ubisoft San Francisco on South Park’s next AAA game sequel, The Fractured but Whole.
Ms. Titre-Montgomery’s passion is being a diversity advocate for the game industry. She speaks publicly about how game based curriculums are the key to engaging today’s youth in S.T.E.A.M education and careers. Lisette has been a keynote speaker at N.A.S.A., Intel, Black Girls Code, Girls Who Code, and Soledad O’Brien’s Starfish Foundation. She has also been a featured guest on National Public Radio’s show Tell Me More with Michelle Martin and named One of the Most Powerful Women in Tech by Business Insider.
Jeffrey Eker, CEO and founder, CultureCloud
Jeff absolutely loves travel. He has traveled around the world in eight days, visited thirteen countries outside of the US, and looks forward to visiting many more! In addition to studying abroad at Universität Kassel in Germany, he has completed five internships at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, L-3 Communications / SPD Electrical Systems, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, and Rockwell Automation. In 2016, Jeff graduated from Rowan University with a major in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a minor in German Studies.
Jeff is heavily involved with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) as
the Region 2 Regional Student Representative, where he has the great opportunity to represent students in the mid-Atlantic region of the US on the local and international level. In 2015, Jeff created an international partnership between the IEEE Student Branches at Rowan University and James Cook University in Australia. After a year of projects, seminars, and competitions, he led a team of 10 to Australia to live with local students, participate in industry tours, and shadow students academically to strengthen their international prospective.
Meeting people from around the world is always Jeff’s favorite part of travel, and who he is today
has been shaped in a huge way by the opportunities he’s had to embrace local cultures.
In April 2015, Jeff was presented the amazing opportunity to speak at TEDxTelkomU at Telkom University in Bandung, Indonesia.
Jeff is the CEO and founder of CultureCloud – an app that allows users to connect in real time based on their similar interests. Inspired by friends who showed him the amazing hidden places everywhere he went, Jeff and his team have created CultureCloud as a way for people to break free from the loop between the hotels and the tourist traps. The best travel adventures are not about where you are, but who you’re with.
Tracy Chou, Software Engineer
Tracy Chou is a software engineer currently contemplating her next adventure. She was most recently at Pinterest on the home feed and recommendations team, previously a tech lead on the ads and web teams, and worked on infrastructure, API, email, and growth as well. Before Pinterest, she worked at Quora, also as an early engineer there.
In addition to her engineering career, Tracy is most well-known for her work pushing for diversity in tech. In 2013, she helped to kick off the wave of tech company diversity data disclosures with a Github repository collecting numbers on women in engineering. Tracy is now a founding member of Project Include and focused on driving solutions in the space. She was named Forbes Tech 30 under 30 in 2014 and has been profiled in Vogue and WIRED for her advocacy.
Tracy is also an advisor to Homebrew VC and on reserve with the U.S. Digital Service.
Tracy graduated from Stanford with an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, where she was a Terman Scholar and Mayfield Fellow and elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi.