Highlighting Exceptional Women in Engineering: LeadGenius TechTalks
When I was a graduate student in engineering at Berkeley, I worked closely with prominent, highly technical women at every level — they were my professors, classmates, and friends. I know that my co-founders Dave and Prayag had similar experiences. As a result, I’ve always been surprised that mainstream Silicon Valley seemed to have such a different attitude about the role of women in engineering. It’s fundamentally at odds with the work I regularly see done by my friends and peers.
As a company directly invested in bettering the lives of women in our international community, as well as an increasingly prominent tech employer in the East Bay, I’ve often felt we have a responsibility to correct that perception here at LeadGenius.
Consequently, I’m pleased to introduce a new program organized by two members of our team — LeadGenius TechTalks. Ruby Bhattacharya and Danelle Black have put together a new initiative to highlight remarkable work being done by Bay Area engineers who happen to be women.
While there are many forums explicitly discussing the issues women face in technology careers, TechTalks won’t be about that. Instead, we’re looking to normalize the presence of prominent women in computer science by highlighting interesting, successful people who are doing remarkable work.
The TechTalks series brings rising-star female engineers from around the Bay Area to share details of their current work in an informal setting (our backyard in Berkeley).
For LeadGenius, TechTalks provide a way to reinforce our core organizational commitment to women and to provide modest leadership by example in this discussion. It also underscores our own efforts to invite women to join our team as we scale up our technology and data teams in the next year.
We’ve brought together a remarkable set of women to speak here at LeadGenius over the course of the next year. All of them are doing preeminent, exciting and relevant work in various fields of computer science, with applications in finance, agriculture, sales, humor and music.
Our first speaker is Marci Meingast, Ph.D., a computer vision expert working on intelligent robotic farming at Blue River Technologies. Drone / robotic technology is rapidly becoming mainstream on modern farms. Well before we see driverless cars on the freeways, we’re going to see robotically-enhanced tractors fertilizing our fields. This presents unique opportunities for agriculture: precision robot-aided farming enables farmers to improve yield and reduce pesticide use, even while raising new challenges in vision and robotic sensing.
Before coming to Blue River, Marci had a storied career working on the user interface for Stephen Hawking’s text-to-speech system at Intel Research. Before that, she conducted pioneering computer vision research in films, as well as looking at the intersection of privacy and vision problems at Adobe, Google and UC Berkeley. She’s also a very passable saxophonist.
Sounds like fun? Sign up here — we’ll see you this Thursday at 6:30 at LeadGenius HQ in Berkeley.
