Naomi Kellman | Rare Recruitment Limited
Naomi Kellman studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford.
On graduating in 2011, she joined diversity specialist Rare. In this role she founded Target Oxbridge, a programme that has helped over 140 black African and Caribbean students secure Oxbridge offers, and currently supports 160 students a year.
Naomi spent 2012 – 2015 working on education policy at the Department for Education and the Treasury, and also served three years as a secondary school governor.
Naomi has co-founded both the BAME Fast Stream Network and the Oxford Black Alumni Network, and has made appearances on Sky News, BBC News, BBC Radio and Channel 5 News to discuss Oxbridge access.
She is currently Rare’s Senior Manager for Schools and Universities, leading on Rare's campus recruitment, school work experience programmes, and university employability schemes.
Naomi also recently became a Trustee for Ebony Horse Club, where she uses her experience in university and graduate recruitment to support the charity's aims of improving outcomes for young people in Brixton.
Stephanie Itimi | Seidea
Nigerian-born Stephanie Itimi is the founder of Seidea, a social enterprise focused on helping black and ethnic minority women build cybersecurity and IT careers through lectures and webinars by industry experts.
She has a track record of facilitating significant development initiatives and was part of the team that pioneered the world’s first public health information service inside the WhatsApp platform.
Tackling fake news on Ebola, it provided content in text, images and audio to users in West Africa from the BBC World Service as well as through partners Unicef, World Health Organisation, World Food Programme and the Centre for Disease Control.
A published author of an academic book titled “The Informal Sector in Nigeria and its impact on Development”, she is an Advisor at Africa Business Portal. She sits at the Advisory Board for The Young Politicians and Leaders Network (UK, Liberia and Ghana). She has also played a leading role in the creation and production of high-profile projects in Slovakia, Morocco, UK, Uganda & several West African countries through her various consultancy experiences with Culture Fez, Balloon Ventures and the European Commission, advocating freedom of information, digital literacy, economic empowerment and gender equality.
Siobhan Sherry | Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
My undergraduate degree is in Biology and after graduating in 2009 I worked in a lab in Newcastle, before returning to University in 2010 to study Environmental Consultancy.
My Masters dissertation was in contaminated land, however given the economic climate at the time of graduation there was very little remediation taking place. I managed to secure a maternity leave cover as the Contaminated Land Officer at Darlington Borough Council, but left when the incumbent officer returned.
I then moved to the Marine Management Organisation where I worked on marine licencing. In this role I worked on a range of projects from very small scale pontoons to Hinkley and Sizewell Nuclear power plants.
In 2014 I moved to London and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) where I worked on flood policy in response to the 2013/14 Somerset floods.
After 15 months I was promoted to Senior Scientific Officer working in the Land Use division managing a £7million research budget which covered sustainable intensification of agriculture, soils and peatlands, forestry, and agri-environment monitoring and evaluation.
In late 2017 I moved to the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to lead the Biomass Electricity team as part of the Clean Electricity Directorate.
Jacquelyn Guderley | MNTL HLTH
Jacquelyn is a mental health and gender equality advocate, social entrepreneur, and listed as one of the UK’s most influential Women in Tech in 2017 & 2018 by Computer Weekly, one of the top 50 champions of women in business 2017 by the Financial Times & HERoes and included in BusinessCloud’s Top Female Tech Trailblazers in 2019.
She began her career as a management consultant in the technology sector, at Accenture, where she played a key role in company-wide gender initiatives, including piloting and launching Accenture’s Girls in Tech programme.
In 2013 she became cofounder of Stemettes, an award-winning social enterprise that inspires girls aged 5-22 to pursue careers in Science, Tech, Engineering & Maths through fun, tech-filled events. Stemettes have worked with almost 40k girls around the globe to inspire them into STEM.
In 2016 she joined the management team and steering committee of the Tech Talent Charter, an initiative that brings together industries and organisations to drive diversity and address gender imbalance in technology roles. That year, she also stood as a political candidate for the Women’s Equality Party, wanting to address the systemic imbalances relating to gender in society, writing their party policies around women in tech and business.
In 2017, Jacquelyn founded and became chief exec of Salomé, the literary magazine for emerging female writers, a platform that aims to tackle gender inequality in publishing. Salomé authors went on to secure publishing deals for debut novels.
2019 has seen the launch of Jacquelyn's newest venture - MNTL HLTH - an organisation born out of her own mental health challenges in the past. MNTL HLTH runs events to break the silence around mental health and drive positive action and change in the mental health landscape. Jacquelyn is also currently Head of Operations at Love Language, a company that works to break down the societal barriers between D/deaf and hearing people through BSL interpreter access.
Jacquelyn has been in the national press – both for her work at Stemettes and for driving a successful campaign to prevent the UK government from removing Feminism from the A Level politics syllabus. She is also a long-standing volunteer for Jami, the Jewish Association for Mental Illness, and an Ambassador for MQ, the mental health research charity and for Big Youth Group, an organisation improving the odds for young people.
Sheree Atcheson | Deloitte
Listed as one of the UK's Top Most Influential Women in Tech & an international multi-award winner for her services to Diversity & Inclusion in the Tech industry, Sheree (@nirushika) is the U.K. Technology Respect & Inclusion Manager, Deloitte; Founder, I Am Lanka; Board-Appointed Global Ambassador, Women Who Code; Contributor, Forbes.
Sheree is a global tech outreach leader and as a paassionate advocate for gaining/retaining women in the tech industry, she launched & led the award-winning U.K. expansion of Women Who Code (womenwhocode.com), since 2013.
Women Who Code is the world’s largest global non-profit dedicated to helping women excel in tech careers. Sheree & her work have been featured in many publications, such as HuffPost, Marie Claire, Wired, ComputerWeekly, The Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Newsletter & many more.
As a subject matter expert, she also delivers trainings/workshops on : allyship, privilege awareness, unconscious bias, understanding the business of diversity and inclusion, personal branding, empowering yourself to empower others.
The aim of her career is ensuring people are aware of the fantastic opportunities the tech industry has to offer & make certain that people (regardless of gender, race, social stature) are able to benefit from these & reach their full career potential.
Sharniya Ferdinand | NatWest
Sharniya has progressed quickly through NatWest during the past 7 years – growing a reputation as the face of the bank in communities across London.
With experience spanning personal, business and commercial banking this has involved her supporting businesses to grow, scale and create personal wealth. A key part of Sharniya’s success has been to host expert educational business events that encouraged customers to network and exceed their business expectations. These free to attend events quickly became famous both internally and externally to NatWest with significant media coverage.
An additional key part of the work Sharniya led during this time was to support female business owners. In 2017 Sharniya was recognised with the RBS Women’s Opal award for her contribution to Women in Business.
Following the success of her previous role Sharniya was promoted to Business Inclusion Programme Coordinator, a role that is unique to Sharniya. This position involves managing a customer led strategic programme of inclusion activities across the bank and for commercial clients.
As an individual, Sharniya is passionate about diversity and inclusion and empowering those who are underrepresented in their industries and communities. Sharniya is an Inclusion Champion and supports NatWest’s aspiration to be a truly inclusive place to work.
Sharniya has a drive for personal improvement and knowledge which has seen her achieve a BSc (Hons) in Psychology and a Masters in Events and Exhibitions Management. In her spare time, Sharniya writes an online blog - sharing her personal experiences in life - whilst being an avid traveller.
Elizabeth Seward | Airbus
Elizabeth Seward has over 15 years of experience in the space industry and is a Senior Strategist for the Space Systems division of Airbus Defence and Space, responsible for the UK strategy across all areas of satellite manufacturing.
Previous roles include leading the Earth Observation, Navigation and Science marketing team, thermal engineering and mission systems engineering in the future programmes team, where she worked on projects such as the first study for the ExoMars rover and a mission to return a sample from an asteroid.
Elizabeth is on the executive board of Women in Aerospace Europe (WIA-E) and the chair of the WIA-E UK local group, which she helped to set-up in 2016. She is also active in the International Astronautical Federation, sitting on the Entrepreneurship and Investment committee, the Honours and Awards committee, the GEOSS committee and is a previous vice chair and continuing committee member of the Workforce Development and Young Professionals Committee.
As a STEM outreach ambassador, Elizabeth has presented to groups and schools, and has made appearances as a space expert in various media.
Elizabeth has an MPhys degree in Physics with Space Science & Technology from the University of Leicester.
Salma Zulfiqar | SBZ Creative Media
Salma Zulfiqar is an International Artist and Activist empowering refugee and migrant women, promoting integration, working towards preventing hate crimes and extremism.
Salma has also highlighted the underreported plight of women and children all over the world with the United Nations.
In 2017, she was voted one of the most inspirational women to hail from Birmingham and her work was documented in the book Women Who Dared to Dream alongside Nobel Laureate, Malala Yousafzai.
Sarah Garnett | Telefonica UK Ltd
I joined O2 back in 2010 as an apprentice in our Operations function.
I’ve spent the last 9 years in a number of different roles from Internal Communications to project managing Europe’s biggest technology event, Campus Party.
I made the big leap into HR where I worked in Early Careers helping to drive our generation agenda bringing talented under 30’s into the organisation.
I am now the Inclusion Manager for the UK which means I work with our senior leaders to drive and implement our D&I strategy.
I work really closely with our three employee networks (BAME, LGBT+ and Womens Network) to ensure we are meeting/exceeding our targets.
I am really passionate about my work and I want to create an open and inclusive culture, where everyone feels empowered to come to work and be themselves.
Fabia Howard-Smith | Accenture
Fabia is a digital consulting analyst at Accenture, prior to that she graduated from UCL with a BASc in marketing and psychology.
During her time at Accenture she has helped clients navigate digital innovation and strategy, delivering marketing and transformation projects across myriad industries.
Working in technical environments often driven by functional requirements, Fabia challenges her clients to focus on the end-user’s needs. She has proactively achieved the IDEO human-centred design certification. Becoming an advocate for user research and incorporating design thinking into her work; including training clients and colleagues on the topic.
She’s passionate about Girls in STEM initiatives: organising leadership events for colleagues to engage in meaningful discussions about gender, facilitating hackathons to teach young children about STEM and leading groups of school girls at Accenture’s Girls in STEM events. She thrives on creatively solving challenging problems, helping clients identify and address pain-points through innovative solutions. An example of this was when she won the Ulster bank Hackathon in 2018 with her customer-centric idea based on retention and loyalty.
Combining her interests of human-centred design and innovation, Fabia has co-authored a paper on AI and ethics, published by the House of Lords Artificial Intelligence Committee. Also, she’s actively involved in a grassroots ethics network that publish the ‘Ethical Hotlist’- a monthly roundup of digital initiatives at the intersection of ethics and technology.