Liz Freedman is the Head of Talent and D&I at InterContinental Hotels Group.

Acknowledged as one of the Top 100 Minority Executives two years in a row, Rocki Howard is Chief Diversity Officer for SmartRecruiters. She is the host of the Voices of Diversity and the Grown Woman Life podcasts, creator of the Grown Woman Life Power Players List, and a tenured talent acquisition strategist.

With a background in recruitment/talent acquisition leadership and Lean, Project Management, and HR certifications her 20+ year career spans over diverse industries including banking, retail, manufacturing, distribution, pharmaceutical, and insurance.

With several obstacles in her way, Rocki climbed her way from entry-level to executive leadership. She is a proud over 40, black, Christian wife and mom who prioritizes being a voice for the underrepresented. She is on a mission to help her customers disrupt the intersection of diversity and recruitment and create systems that lead to simple, substantive, sincere, and sustainable diversity solutions.

She believes "If we change the lives of the underrepresented, we change the world."

Julia Stoyanovich is an Institute Associate Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the Tandon School of Engineering, Associate Professor of Data Science at the Center for Data Science, and Director of the Center for Responsible AI at New York University (NYU).  Her research focuses on responsible data management and analysis: on operationalizing fairness, diversity, transparency, and data protection in all stages of the data science lifecycle.  She established the "Data, Responsibly" consortium and served on the New York City Automated Decision Systems Task Force, by appointment from Mayor de Blasio.  Julia developed and has been teaching courses on Responsible Data Science at NYU, and is a co-creator of an award-winning comic book series on this topic.  In addition to data ethics, Julia works on the management and analysis of preference and voting data, and on querying large evolving graphs. She holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Columbia University, and a B.S. in Computer Science and in Mathematics & Statistics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  She is a Senior Member of the ACM, and a recipient of an NSF CAREER award and of an NSF/CRA CI Fellowship.

Suzanne Rosenthal is the Vice President, Talent Acquisition – Campus & Early Career Recruiting, ViacomCBS.

During her 20+ year tenure at Viacom, now Viacom CBS as of December 2019, Suzanne has held a number of roles within the Talent Acquisition team, starting as an entry level Recruiting Assistant. In her current role, she leads campus and early career recruitment efforts and supports a wide range of initiatives designed to identify, develop and retain top talent. Suzanne oversees early career full time recruitment and recruitment, talent management, strategic design and execution of our best in class internship program and early career talent development pipeline programs.

Prior to joining Viacom, Suzanne worked for the advertising agency N.W. Ayer & Partners as an Assistant in Human Resources. She was a true generalist supporting recruiting, employee relations, payroll and employee events.

Developing a pathway for talent is not only core to Suzanne’s work but is something she has been passionate about throughout her career. Her role allows her to truly live her passion for cultivating the next generation of leaders within ViacomCBS

Suzanne holds a B.A. in Mass Communications and Business from SUNY Plattsburgh and an M.S. in Adult Education-Human Resources Development from Fordham University. She resides in Long Island, New York with her husband Noah, children Loren and Max, and Golden Retriever – Goldilocks (yes, after Goldilocks and the three bears!)

Gregory Hammons  is the Product Marketing Manager - Google / Founder & CEO Forever Phase, LLC.

Vijay Swaminathan is the Co-Founder & CEO of Draup, an AI-Driven Reskilling and Talent Intelligence Platform. Vijay has extensive experience in the areas of Product Ideation, Concept to Productization, and Platform enablement. He brings a wealth of expertise in the areas of Data Analytics, Operations Research, and Strategic Management. He has developed numerous quantitative models and heuristics related to global talent, business analytics, and strategic business initiatives.

Vijay is also the co-founder of Zinnov (a leading research & advisory firm) and TalentNeuron (acquired by CEB a Gartner Company (NYSE:IT)). Prior to co-founding Zinnov and TalentNeuron, Vijay held senior positions at Hewitt Associates and KPMG Consulting. He is passionate about translating business ideas into tangible Intellectual Property.

PaShon Mann is the VP Talent Acquisition at Comcast.

Peter Sursi is the senior executive, recruiting & hiring at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), where he oversees recruiting, staffing, employment marketing, and workforce strategy efforts for all FBI offices around the country.

Tarawhona (Tara) Bellevue is an award winning education and leadership executive who delivers high-energy and inspirational keynote presentations. As a little girl from South Carolina she had big dreams with an adventurous spirit. Tara envisioned herself as a business executive and after high school obtained her B.S. in Business Administration. She went on to pursue a Master’s Degree in Secondary Education, which opened up a plethora of opportunities that allowed her to shape the minds of young people, become an award winning teacher, administrator, and appointed as the first woman of color for Business Teachers Association of NYS.

Tara is currently the Vice President of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Access (IDEA) Strategy for NAF, where she brings stakeholders together to solve huge educational and economical challenges. She is also the visionary and conference co-founder of Today’s Girl Tomorrow’s Woman

Andrew Myers is the Founder and CEO of RippleMatch, a New York City tech startup that employers build diverse, high performing teams. He attended Yale University, where he studied history and earned Phi Beta Kappa honors before leaving to found RippleMatch. He has been named to Forbes Magazine’s Next 1000, Entrepreneur Magazine’s 27 CEOs Under 27 and the Top 100 Yale Alumni in Technology. Andrew founded RippleMatch to change the current system of early career recruiting: Instead of top employers only visiting and hiring students from prestigious schools, he wanted to make it possible for employers to build relationships with the right students from a wide variety of geographic, socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. Since launching, RippleMatch has helped millions of users from 1300 colleges and universities, and partners with hundreds of leading employers like eBay, EY, and Teach For America, raised $34M in venture funding, and built an incredibly passionate, tight-knit team of 120+ who care deeply about helping employers build diverse, high-performing teams and changing how Gen Z finds work.

Jeremy Schiff earned an undergraduate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2005 and a PhD in Applied Machine Learning in 2009 from The University of California, Berkeley. In 2006, Jeremy co-founded FotoFlexer.com, an online photo editing company that powered companies including MySpace and Photobucket. In 2009, Jeremy joined Ness Computing as VP of Product and Machine Learning, which was sold to OpenTable in 2014. While working at OpenTable, Jeremy saw first-hand the opportunity to transform the way that recruiting works through machine learning and automation, and founded RecruitBot in 2017 to spearhead the mission to automate recruiting

Shannon Gaydos is a customer success manager at Eightfold. She is a talent and technology strategist with more than 16 years of experience leading operations at Amgen, Ally Bank, General Motors and The Boeing Company. A frequent thought leader on future of work topics, Gaydos is the author of the book, The 2030 Papers: How Tech, Debt & Aging Will Change the Way We Learn, Work & Die.

Emtrain founder and CEO Janine Yancey is a passionate advocate for healthy workplace cultures. Janine’s unique approach blends technology, behavioral science, data analytics, and social media-inspired interactions to help inform and improve workplace behavior. Janine presides over a team of experts and an extensive library of content including courses, video, resource guides, checklists and analytic reports that define the modern workplace.

Janine is a proponent of neutral, third-party guidance and problem-solving. By orchestrating a publicly-accessible community interface for employee questions and concerns, Janine stays at the forefront of real-world, real-time harassment, bias, discrimination, and ethics issues.

A tireless visionary, Janine writes extensively, has provided expert testimony and advice to state legislatures, and helps leading companies implement harassment prevention, diversity, ethics, and compliance programs. Janine is a sought-after speaker and has been published and interviewed in the mainstream media including The Washington Post, Fast Company, USA Today, Bloomberg Business, TechCrunch, and Startup Grind. She’s presented at Society of Ethics and Compliance; Techstars FounderCon; Founders Network, and The Club.

Prior to founding Emtrain, Janine was a partner at Employment Law Partners where she specialized in solving labor and employment problems for high tech firms including Google, Intuit and a variety of start-ups. Janine also worked as counsel at Liebert Cassidy Whitmore, served as Board Member of the Northern California Human Resources Association, and authored The HR Handbook, designed to help young tech companies navigate workplace laws.

Janine earned her JD at the University of California Hastings School of Law and a BA in English and Political Science at the University of California Berkeley.

David York is the Global Head of Recruiting at Creative Artists Agency.

Erin Pierpoint is the Head of Talent Strategy: Global D&I Recruitment, Early Career, Social Media & Brand at Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Lydia Dishman is Fast Company’s senior editor for growth and engagement. She has also written for CBS Moneywatch, Fortune, The Guardian, Popular Science, and the New York Times, among others.

Emily Nonko is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, NY, who has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Fast Company and the New York Times. Among the topics she covers are urbanism, social justice, architecture, and real estate.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz at Work, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.