Women at Blockchain at Berkeley
When it comes to gender, the worlds of tech and finance have been historically imbalanced. At Blockchain at Berkeley, we’re aware that the blockchain industry, while in its infancy, is no exception to this disparity.
This article recognizes some of the leaders and rising stars in our organization who are paving the way for gender diversity in the blockchain space. Inspired by these individuals, we welcome leaders of all identities, and aim to increase the diversity of the space as we continue to expand our membership. With our commitment to cutting-edge education and inclusive community outreach, we hope to make professional blockchain expertise an accessible opportunity for all.
To honor this commitment, Blockchain at Berkeley is hosting She256: Women in Blockchain Conference, the largest event of its kind to date. The conference will explore the ground-breaking research, protocols, and specific applications of blockchain — especially those led by women in the space. All are welcome to celebrate and learn with us! No prior experience in technology, blockchain, or computer science is necessary. To learn more, check out www.she256.io.
Without further ado, here are some of the female members at Blockchain at Berkeley who are demonstrating excellence daily and helping to build future leaders in the space!
Aparna Krishnan
Aparna Krishnan is a leading researcher and Co-Head of Education at Blockchain at Berkeley. She has taught Blockchain at Berkeley’s university accredited Blockchain Fundamentals course, and Executive Education programs at the UC Berkeley School of Law, Mercedes Benz, and various governmental organizations. She is a longstanding member of Blockchain at Berkeley’s executive board, and a key mentor for many future leaders in Blockchain at Berkeley’s education and research departments.
Aparna currently leads the Cryptoeconomics Research team, which has recently received an inaugural grant from the UC Berkeley Blockchain Lab. She is spearheading meta-analyses of scalability solutions in the blockchain space, while approaching her final year of courses as a Computer Science major at Berkeley. She is enthusiastic about bridging the gap between blockchain in academia and industry!
Mashiat Mutmainnah
Mashiat Mutmainnah is the Head of Finance at Blockchain at Berkeley and an Executive Director of She256. She is the COO and Cofounder of Veritas Due Diligence, an ICO Due Diligence firm that filters through the proliferation of ICOs in the market to help individual investors and hedge funds looking to invest in crypto. She has also worked as a project manager for Blockchain at Berkeley, focusing in the fields of provenance and distributed energy resources. She has led projects for for supply chain use-cases in the Dubai prosthetics industry and for Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, which was a Top 3 winner at the Global Blockchain Summit in Shanghai. She is an incoming senior at Berkeley double majoring in Applied Mathematics and Economics, and has previously worked for Ambisafe, an ICO Management Firm.
Nataliya Urakhchina
Nataliya Urakhchina is a blockchain engineer and an education officer at Blockchain at Berkeley. She works within development, education, and research.
Nataliya believes that the topic of technology is broad yet highly linked together in terms of their bottlenecks. Many technological slowdowns, such as compilation, interoperability, obfuscation, security, content management, scalability, and standardization appear communally in the current advancing technologies, including IoT, AI, and blockchain. To solve the software development crisis, Nataliya assures that there needs to be an incentive for more software production — specifically there needs to be an open source alternative.
With this in mind, she is currently working on expanding a community called The Free Proprietary Software Community — dedicated for software developers to perform their software development work in a decentralized manner without having traditional corporations. Her goal is to create a community for software developers organized by all sharing a common patent-protected license, and having dedicated Ethereum coins for the software/products they create. Ultimately, it would incentivize developers to do more work for themselves since they will get paid directly for the software they create. Nataliya has one year left before graduating from UC Berkeley as a Computer Science major.
Gillian Chu
Gillian is currently an instructor for the Blockchain Fundamentals Course at Berkeley, and previously a developer for the Airbus project with Blockchain at Berkeley. She is majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Bioengineering, and is passionate about using tech in healthcare and for social good. At ETHWaterloo in 2017, she helped build a Dapp to help the government provide an interface for DREAMers to pay their taxes and apply for citizenship. She also volunteers with ANova and runs a yearly hackathon for underresourced high school students.
This spring, she will be picking up research at the Petrisch lab at UCSF, working on research and development of preventing cancerous brain tumors in children. She is especially passionate with the intersection of cryptography and blockchain with healthcare, as it can potentially eliminate the inconsistencies and redundancies in the existing system for healthcare data.
Medha Kothari
Medha Kothari is Head of Operations at Blockchain at Berkeley and an incoming third-year Computer Science student at Berkeley. As Head of Operations, she leads teams to ensure that the organization runs smoothly and mitigates any inefficiencies along the way. In addition to being a blockchain engineer and leader, she also works as a Technology Consultant under the Berkeley Student Technology Services, where she provides tech support for software and hardware issues throughout campus.
She became interested in the blockchain space only a year ago, and since then has been very interested in the field’s exponential growth. She enjoys the fact that it is one of the few fields in which you can be considered an expert regardless of your age. She is a cofounder and Executive Director for She256, as she is very passionate about changing the field while it is in its infancy, and increasing diversity to collectively work together to push the boundaries of this technology further through innovation!
Alexis Gauba
Alexis Gauba is a Cofounder and Executive Director of SHE256 and is working on cryptoeconomic research at Blockchain at Berkeley. Alexis has conducted research on 33% Attack Vectors in Proof of Stake and is part of UC Berkeley SCET Blockchain Lab’s inaugural set of grant recipients for cryptoeconomic research. Most recently, she co-authored an article with Blockchain at Berkeley’s Head of R&D on the need for an incentive scheme in Algorand. She has also done development in the space, winning awards at CalHacks and the World CryptoEconomic Forum Hackathon. As a rising second-year Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences student at UC Berkeley, Alexis will be joining Thunder this summer working on research and development.
Gloria Wang
Gloria (Mengyi) Wang is a co-lecturer of the EdX Online Course Cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin and the Crypto Space along with Rustie Lin, which will be released on the Berkeley EdX platform in July. She also heads a discussion section for the Blockchain Fundamental Decal, the first accredited student-run blockchain survey course. Prior to joining Blockchain at Berkeley, Gloria interned at Bain & Company, and will be interning at Simon-Kucher & Partners this upcoming summer as well. Gloria is the most passionate about blockchain use-case analysis, and she’s excited to explore business strategies and monetization schemes for blockchain projects.
Gloria Zhao
Gloria Zhao has been with Blockchain at Berkeley as a consultant for research in blockchain for pharmaceutical supply chains, a lecturer and course administrator for the Blockchain Fundamentals DeCal course. She is currently the Social Chair of the organization and organizes events and activities which promote the sharing of ideas and effective team-building in Blockchain at Berkeley. She is a second-year student at UC Berkeley studying Computer Science and Psychology.
While she aims to educate as many people as possible about blockchain technology, Gloria is also passionate about sustainability and fair trade. She hopes to see a blockchain-enabled future where supply chain transparency and ethical consumerism are the norm.
Sara Reynolds
Sara Reynolds is the head TA for Blockchain at Berkeley’s university credited course Blockchain Fundamentals. She is a key contributor to Blockchain at Berkeley’s partnership with the U.S. Department of Commerce, and she is also a cofounder and Executive Director of She256. Her interests lie in education in Blockchain basics, Blockchain use case analysis, and more. Sara will continue to pursue these interests while also studying computer science and economics at Berkeley.
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