Diverse Voices 2020 Speaker Series Now Online

(Source: UC Santa Cruz)

May 27, 2020 — Santa Cruz, CA

(Image source: UC Santa Cruz)

Speaker series features diverse group of leaders in engineering and tech

[Editor’s note: information for this article is derived from a number of pages on the UC Santa Cruz website. The list of pages in featured at the bottom of this article.]

The Baskin School of Engineering presents Diverse Voices 2020, a professional speaker series featuring a diverse group of industry leaders, including B. Pagels Minor, Laura Mather, and alum Tara Hernandez (Cowell ’95, computer and information sciences).

The Diverse Voices Speaker Series started last year as part of ongoing efforts to get a more diverse population interested in pursuing engineering degrees and careers in technology.

B. Pagels-Minor (they/them): Senior Engineering Program Manager, Apple

“How To Find the Right Fit for You in Tech”

From Mississippi to Chicago to Silicon Valley, B. has built their career around building great products for amazing brands while also working to enrich their community around them. B. is a native of Mississippi who relocated to the Silicon Valley in 2018 from Chicago. B. is an enthusiast for anything technology related, as well as randomly obscure trivia facts. B. works in the technology industry and spends much too much time scouring the latest financial, footwear and technology news for new tech toys and shoes for their collection.

B. works in the technology industry and spends much too much time scouring the latest financial, footwear and technology news for new tech toys and shoes for their collection.

Tara Hernandez (they/them): Senior Engineering Manager, Google

“Data-Driven Diversity: High-Tech Industry’s Best Return on Investment“

Tara Hernandez is a specialist in software engineering infrastructure and was an early promoter of what came to be known as the Continuous Integration revolution. Their most notable stint was at Netscape Communications Corporation where they initially helped develop new developer tools such as Tinderbox and Bugzilla, both of which were later released to the public as open source along with the Netscape browser codebase as part of the creation of Mozilla.org.

At one point they ended up at Pixar Animation Studios where their team reinvented much of the development infrastructure to handle the challenges of writing software in a film production environment. Tara is now at Google, working to help create a really cool cloud developer platform. In their copious amounts of free time they blogs hopefully useful things about engineering management, is a member of the Technical Oversight Committee for the Continuous Delivery Foundation, is an Associate Board member of Women Who Code, and hosts the ‘Women Who Code Radio’ podcast.

Laura Mather (she/her): CEO and Entrepreneur

“5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Company”

Laura Mather has been a Chief Executive Officer, Board Director and Entrepreneur with expertise building global enterprise software companies. She is a renowned expert on cybersecurity, fraud protection and data privacy. She has extensive experience in business strategy, risk management, go-to-market strategy, raising capital and financial management. Laura has advised boards of directors and advisory boards on business strategy, cybersecurity, data privacy, risk management and marketing.

She is a highly experienced speaker at global business, technology and leadership conferences on data privacy, cybersecurity, recruiting/human resources and entrepreneurship and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors for engineering, entrepreneurship and innovation.

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Information for this article was originally published on the following sites:

• https://undergrad.soe.ucsc.edu/diverse-speaker-series-2020
• https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/02/diverse-voices.html
• https://undergrad.soe.ucsc.edu/b-pagels-minor
• https://undergrad.soe.ucsc.edu/tara-hernandez
• https://undergrad.soe.ucsc.edu/laura-mather

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Tagged Diversity