Ascend NorCal March Inspiring Across Generations
Speaker Bios:
Jennifer Ouyang Altman
CEO, Inner Radio
Jennifer Ouyang Altman founded Inner Radio after an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB) and 10 years in sales leadership. She works with executives to expand their leadership style, build effective interpersonal relationships, and harness the power of teams.
She facilitates Interpersonal Dynamics, Stanford Graduate School of Business’ most popular elective on building effective professional relationships. Beyond working with MBAs, she facilitates courses on communication and storytelling with GSB’s executive program and is a CEO coach for Berkeley Haas’ CEO program. This year she joins Stanford GSB’s High Performing Leaders course team teaching students how to move from the “heroic leader” mindset to a leader who shares the burden and leads sustainably.
Jennifer loves bringing people together with food, playing tennis, and connecting to music through dance. Her work has been published in the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.
Rani Bhuva
Partner, EY
Rani Bhuva is a Principal with EY based out of San Francisco, where she is the Global Consulting Partner for a large payments fintech and also leads the West regional data and analytics practices. She has spent nearly 20 years in the financial services industry in various roles spanning industry and consulting; working across the globe and and through mulitple financial crises. Rani graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with undergraduate degrees in Management Science and Mathematics with Computer Science.
Raghav Kohli
Director, Automotive Partnerships & Assistant General Counsel, Waymo
Raghav Kohli serves on the Senior Leadership Team at Waymo LLC (formerly the Google Self-Driving Car Project) focused on supporting the development of autonomous technology to make it safe and easy for people and things to get where they are going. In a dual-role as Director of Automotive Partnerships and Assistant General Counsel, he leads a team of business development professionals and lawyers that negotiate and execute complex first-in-kind transactions to facilitate the development, deployment and commercialization of Waymo’s fully autonomous technology. Prior to Waymo, Raghav was a part of the legal team at Google counseling on various products and services, including advising on transactions to support the launch of Google’s consumer hardware business. Raghav started his career in private practice both as a patent litigator and technology transactions attorney and holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and a J.D. from Boston College.
Janine Lee
Global L&D Strategy & Operations Leader, Google
Janine Lee has 15+ years experiencein learning and development (L&D), diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), digital transformation, business operations, continuous improvement, process improvement, and change management. She currently works at Google as a Global L&D Strategy & OperationsLeader and spearheads leadership capabilities for the DEI Belonging Council.
Janine is a Certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and Certified Executive Coach. As a UC Berkeley Haas MBA Graduate and USC Doctor of Education (EdD) 2023 Candidate, Janine has been lecturing for 8+ years as an Adjunct Professor with over 200+ students in 35+ countries in the world on topics such as DEI, racial equity, leadership, communications, digital transformation, and international business in South Africa at top universities including the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, Santa Clara University Leavey School of Business, and the UC Berkeley Center of Executive Education. As a doctoral candidate, Janine is publishing her dissertation this summer on increasing the sense of belonging for Women of Color in Technology.
Janine has won dozens of internationally acclaimed awards for her leadership such as the Maybelline New York Empowerment through Education Award, Bank of America Local Hero Award, L’Oreal Paris Women of Worth Finalist, and Jefferson Awards for Public Service from President Obama. With her dedication to lead and create diverse and inclusive teams at Google, Janine recently won the 2022 gTech GTM ‘Grow our Leaders’ Award where she was recognized as a DEI champion for fellow Googlers.
Elenor Mak
Founder & CEO, Jilly Bing
Elenor Mak, is founder and CEO of Jilly Bing, the first toy company to create dolls and characters that resemble Asian American children. While searching for her daughter’s first doll, she was appalled at the options. Rather than accept the status quo, Elenor did what she has done her entire career: She created something from nothing.
Before Jilly Bing, Elenor co-founded Keaton Row, an e-commerce fashion company. She next led the go-to-market strategy for Target’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence team. In 2017, Elenor joined the venture backed startup, Madison Reed. Under Elenor’s leadership, Madison Reed opened its flagship locations on the East and West coasts.
Elenor received her MBA from Harvard Business School and graduated from Dartmouth College with a major in economics. She lives in San Francisco with Richard, her husband and their two young children, James and Jillian, who probably believe they have a third sibling named Jilly Bing.
Sonika Singal
Technology Strategy and Advisory Executive
Sonika is a Managing Director at Accenture experienced in product management, engineering, sales, and operations. During her 20+ years of career, she has led several large-scale transformative and strategic programs. She is futuristic, builds high performing cross functional teams and turns ideas into reality. She is a trusted adviser to executives, enabling them to solve complex business problems employing critical thinking, and entrepreneurial spirit.
Sonika has a unique blend of consulting and tech experience across multiple industries through her work at Accenture, IBM, GE, and several tech startups. She advises startups, serves on boards and is passionate for social impact with special interest in youth education and women empowerment.
Richard Tsai
Senior Medical Director, Denali Therapeutics
Richard Tsai MD, MBA is a Senior Medical Director in Early Clinical Development at Denali Therapeutics, where he leads multidisciplinary teams to design and execute first-in-human, biomarker, experimental medicine studies.
Previously, Richard was an Assistant Professor of Neurology and Associate Director of Alzheimer's Disease and Frontotemporal Dementia Clinical Trials Program at the Memory and Aging Center, USCF where he conducted research in imaging biomarkers and therapeutics in neurodegeneration. Richard diagnosed and cared for patients with memory disorders and led a free, Chinese language memory clinic for patients living in San Francisco's Chinatown.
Richard received an undergraduate degree in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and a joint MD/MBA degree at Drexel University. He completed his neurology residency at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, serving as chief resident in his last year. He then completed a fellowship in behavioral neurology at the UCSF.