Kris Howard
Director of Developer Relations at YOW! Australia
Kris Howard has been building websites in one form or another for over twenty years. She's been a developer, a business analyst, and a manager; and most recently wrangled engineers at Canva, one of Australia's fastest growing startups. She now heads up Developer Relations for YOW Conferences, meeting and working with developers around the country. She's spoken at meetups and events across Australia and Asia, including TEDx Melbourne. Her Instagram account is pretty much all selfies and food.
ALEX Gilleran
Senior Software Engineer at CSIRO Data61 and Hackathon Organiser
Alex Gilleran is a long time organiser of Random Hacks of Kindness in Sydney in addition to being a Senior Developer at CSIRO Data61. He has worked across commercial projects for IBM, government and in agencies in Australia and the USA. Currently he works on the open source projects Terria and the open government portal MAGDA.
MARTIN DUUSMA
Partner at Main Sequence Ventures
Martin Duursma joined Main Sequence Ventures in June, 2017. Martin has over 25 years experience as a Senior Executive, Technologist, Business Founder, Angel Investor and Mentor both in Australia and the US. Prior to joining Main Sequence Martin was a senior executive with a range of global responsibilities at Citrix. Martin joined Citrix in 1997 when it acquired Datapac Australasia, a company which he co-founded. While at Citrix Martin started and built the company's research arm, Citrix Labs, started and led the CTO Council and CTO function and also started the Citrix Accelerator and led the investment in over 30 new companies. As VP and head of the Global Technology Office, Martin led due diligence in over 60 transactions totalling $2.5B in value.
Martin continues to be active as an angel investor as well as in various advisor and mentor roles at Macquarie University, Sydney University and ON, Australia’s national science technology accelerator and as board trustee at the Computer History Museum, CA USA. Martin holds a Bachelor of Computer Science and a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from Sydney University.
KELSEY SCHWYNN
General Manager, Today Sydney
Kelsey is the General Manager for Today's Sydney studio. She has a background in product strategy and business design, having worked at large agencies in the US, including frog design, Huge and IBM. She is passionate about human-centred design and volunteers with organisations that teach the tenets of design thinking to young people.
Kelsey has a deep love for all things service design and making a positive, measurable impact through her work. Kelsey has instigated Today’s approach to ensuring that every project we do delivers on the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Today is a strategic design company for people and planet. In a time of complex challenges and limitless possibility, we need to work together to create a better tomorrow. Our role is to help people collaborate.
OLDOOZ DIANAT
Revenue NSW
I received my B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from The University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, M.Sc. in Computer Science from University Technology Malaysia (UTM), Johor Bahru, Malaysia, and Ph.D. (2014) in Computer Science from Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. The topic of my PhD thesis was "Representing and Reasoning about Bayesian Games with Epistemic Logic". My supervisors were Prof. Mehmet Orgun and Dr Lee Flax. Prior to joining Macquarie University as a PhD Candidate, Tutor and Adjunct Lecturer, I worked at international industries as System Executive and Software Programmer. During my PhD I did my internship as a Software Engineer at CISIRO on Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval research. I left academia on April 2016 and joined public sector, Revenue NSW, as a Data Analyst. My current research interests lie in the areas of computational intelligence, deep learning, and formal methods.
Deb Redelman
Centre Co-ordinator at Australasian Community Genetics Program
Debbie has been a qualified Associate Genetic Counsellor since 1993. Initially working in the Perinatal Statistics Unit, then going on to be the State Co-orinator for the Tourette Syndrome Association, and as the Centre Co-ordinator for the Australasian Community Genetics Screening Program since 1996, as well as relief counsellor for the Drugs in Pregnancy and Breastfeeding Hotline.
She was a committee member of the Association of Genetic Support for 5 years, being Chair for 2 years. She was a Project Development Officer for the Department of Medical Genetics at the Children's Hospital at Westmead. Notable achievements were US$150K grant in 1999 and the establishment of the Discipline of Medical Genetics at Sydney University.
She has served on the board of Wolper Jewish Hospital for 10 years, serving on the Community Programs committee for 5 years as well as other committees.
She was a committee member of the NSW Human Genetics Society for 9 years, and treasurer of the National Scientific Meeting for 2 years. This included being a judge of the Student Prize for 3 years. She is still a committee member for the Birth Defects Society, and has been for 11 years, being treasurer for the last 5 years.
She has served on the R&D reference panel for the Alpaca Association for 4 years, as well as Junior Alpaca Handler Judge for the Castle Hill Show for 5 years.
She has presented both Oral and Poster presentations for the HGSA Scientific meetings, and was a recipient of the Meryl Smith Encouragement Award for Professional Development in Genetic Counselling.