TiE-Boston & IIT AGNE in partnership with the MIT EECS department invite you to an engaging discussion that will highlight the unique strengths of and challenges for female innovators, and the ecosystem that supports them. Our panel line-up will feature female entrepreneurs, funders, and advocates that will showcase tools and opportunities for women founders and their allies.
Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande is a Trustee of Deshpande Foundation along with his wife Jaishree. Desh is the President and Chairman of Sparta Group LLC, a family investment office and is also the Chairman of Tejas Networks.
Dr. Deshpande has pursued an entrepreneurial career for the last three decades. He is involved either as the founder, a founding investor or chairman of several companies including Cascade Communications, Sycamore Networks, Coral Networks, Tejas Networks, Cimaron, Webdialogs, Airvana, Sandstone Capital, A123 Systems and Curata. Dr. Deshpande lives in Boston and serves as a life-member of the MIT Corporation, and his support has made possible MIT's Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation.
Deb Kemper is a Managing Director and the Golden Seeds Boston Forum Operating Committee Chair. She leads deal flow, membership, education, and operations. She is an active early-stage investor, mentor to entrepreneurs, and board member.
Prior to Golden Seeds, Deb was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company where she served clients in the healthcare, energy, electronics and consumer products sectors. Deb earned an MBA from The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth where she was a Tuck Scholar. She completed her BS in Engineering from Cornell University where she graduated With Distinction.
Rupal Patel is Founder & CEO of VocaliD, a company that is bringing speaking machines to life through its personalized digital voices. Her training as a clinician and speech scientist led to her initial insight to (re)construct a voice by combining samples of speech from a surrogate talker and the recipient. Rupal is a tenured professor at Northeastern University with joint appointments in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and the College of Computer and Information Science. She is currently on leave to launch VocaliD. VocaliD’s award winning technology leverages its large and growing voicebank of speakers from around the world and voice matching-blending algorithms to create unique vocal identities to enable every voice to be heard.
Aceil is a Director at Bloomer HealthTech working to chart the integration strategy and UX design for Bloomer HealthTech's first product. She previously built and managed a product design team to incorporate empathetic and integrated UX in the urban development process. Aceil holds a Bachelors in Industrial Design from RISD and an MS in Engineering and Management from MIT which shaped her deep understanding for team productivity in user cenetered impact design. Aceil also helped guide early stage startups in multidisciplinary dimensions working on integration of shareholders and end-user goals into design processes. Her personal and public drive is enabling leadership in the teams she works with to create an empowering and conducive environment to innovation and sustainability.
Anantha P. Chandrakasan received the B.S, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989, 1990, and 1994 respectively. Since September 1994, he has been with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, where he is currently the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
He was a co-recipient of several awards including the 2007 ISSCC Beatrice Winner Award for Editorial Excellence and the ISSCC Jack Kilby Award for Outstanding Student Paper (2007, 2008, 2009). He received the 2009 Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) University Researcher Award and the 2013 IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits. In 2015 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Gitanjali Swamy is a Managing Partner at IoTask, an “Innovation of Things” (IoT) company. She is an experienced finance, technology investment professional, innovator and entrepreneur. Dr. Swamy has founded, built and served as a board director in successful entrepreneurial or intra-preneurial enterprises with over a dozen fundraisings and acquisitions under her tenure. She has held investment and professional roles in global leaders including The Carlyle Group and Booz Allen & Hamilton. She is Founder/Advisory Board Member of the U.C. Berkeley Women in Technology Center, Director of Special Projects at Private Capital Research Institute at Harvard Business School, on the Board of National Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Board Advisor to several entrepreneurial ventures.
