Women in Data Panel

Deepa Sankar

Deepa Sankar is the VP of portfolio marketing at Dremio. Deepa has several years of experience in marketing, product and engineering in data and analytics space. Prior to Dremio, Deepa headed the Cloud/iPaaS Product Marketing at Informatica. Before Informatica, Deepa was an entrepreneur with a mission to make the world a safer place for kids.

Misra Turp

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer science in Turkey, Misra Turp moved to the Netherlands to attend a master’s degree program specializating in big data engineering. Fresh out of college, she started her career as a data scientist at IBM, working in the finance and energy industry. While at IBM, she got a lot of questions from aspiring data scientists about how they could start their data science careers. To answer their questions she started a blog titled, “So you want to be a data scientist?”. This grew into a full-blown platform with videos, blog posts, a podcast, and online courses to serve the data science community. After a brief period working in the healthcare industry, she began to focus solely on her blog site full-time. Today, she creates online courses to help beginners learn data science and deep learning and also published content on YouTube and her website.

Juan Pan

Juan Pan (Trista), an AWS Data Hero, is the CTO and co-founder of SphereEx, an open source SaaS commercial startup backed by some of the world’s top VCs. Previously a senior DBA at JD Technology, she was responsible for the design and development of JD Digital Science and Technology’s intelligent database platform.

Juan now focuses on distributed databases and middleware ecosystems and is strongly committed to open source. She is an Apache ShardingSphere Project Management Committee member, as well as mentor with various other Apache incubating projects.

Recipient of the 2020 and 2021 “”China OSCAR Open Source Pioneer”” award, she is frequently invited to speak at relevant conferences in the fields of database and database architecture, including AWS Summit Shanghai and AWS Dev Days.

She loves to encourage more women to pursue careers in technology, and regularly shares her empowering journey from open source contributor to CTO at events such as AWS She Builds Summit. She is also praised by students for her mentorship efforts at initiatives such as Google Summer of Code or Anita B. Org’s Grace Hopper Celebration.

Samantha Kleinberg

Samantha Kleinberg is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stevens Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in Computer Science from New York University and was a Computing Innovation Fellow at Columbia University in the Department of Biomedical informatics. She is the recipient of NSF CAREER and JSMF Complex Systems Scholar Awards. She is the author of Causality, Probability, and Time (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Why: A Guide to Finding and Using Causes (O’Reilly Media, 2015), and editor of Time and Causality Across the Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Pratima Rao Gluckman

For the last two decades, I’ve worked in the software engineering field, where I’ve developed and driven software solutions for both Silicon Valley startups and Fortune 500 companies. Since 2008, I’ve worked in senior leadership for VMware, including roles as Senior R&D Manager for the Cloud Platform Business Unit (CPBU), Engineering Leader for the Networking & Security Business Unit (NSBU), and as Engineering Leader for VMware’s Blockchain Engineering team, LinkedIn, and most recently as Senior Manager at Rivian.

I hold three degrees: a bachelor’s in instrumentation engineering, a master’s in chemistry and computer science. Upon finishing my M.S. in computer science, I worked as a software consultant, developer, and engineer for some of Silicon Valley’s most cutting-edge companies, including IXOS, SAP Labs, Adomo, Inc., and Cast Iron Systems, Inc., and developed applications in J2EE, voice XML, SAP and portal technologies.

I am passionate about diversity in the workplace and have spearheaded several initiatives for gender and diversity efforts, both at VMware, and through my recently published book, Nevertheless She Persisted: True Stories of Women Leaders in Tech, which features the journeys of 19 women technology leaders.

In 2017, I co-founded Innovation for Youth, a startup that designs and delivers educational programs to help build young women’s STEM-related skills and confidence. As a mother of three, including a five-year-old daughter who loves math and writing animation computer scripts, I am committed to championing the next generation of female leaders, helping them grow and thrive in the ever-evolving fields of engineering and technology.