Leadership Journeys: Fireside Chat

Panelists

Elaine Chang

Elaine is a 3-time Golden Bear (undergrad, MIDS, and now a MBA student). Elaine started her career as a management consultant focused on customer strategy and analytics then moved into the public education sector at a nonprofit focused in Los Angeles.

Srishti Mehra

Srishti is a graduate student at UC Berkeley graduating in May with a Master’s in Information and Data Science. She is a data scientist and constant learner for all ways in which data, machine learning can improve lives, products, and businesses. She is passionate about making people feel like they belong — in school, at work, or in any team they are involved with. She has been a grad TA for multiple courses in the program and thinks that is a key part of her MIDS experience. She previously worked as a software engineer (data) at Goldman Sachs in New York and London.

Dr. Alexandra Savelieva

Dr. Alexandra Savelieva is an applied research lead in R&D Azure Data (Synapse ML) and an alumna of the UC Berkeley MIDS program. As part of her hybrid data scientist/engineer role in Microsoft, Alexandra has worked on a variety of interesting problems in networking and IoT, such as optimization of configurations, analysis of hardware performance, capacity planning, and process mining. She is also driving various projects in “AI for good” area, including multi-disciplinary research in computer vision and NLP for improving the accessibility of online content, analysis of student engagement, enabling privacy-preserving ML inferences, using GANs for enhancing photos, and other innovations that can help people benefit from recent advances of digital technologies in a safe and responsible way. Alexandra is an incoming instructor for the I School course Data Science W251 Deep Learning in the Cloud and at the Edge as of this summer term.

Mrinalini Sharma

Mrinalini (Meera) is a data analyst at Fivetran, a tech start-up in the data integration space. Her focus is on analyzing engineering and product data to inform feature rollout, product development, and strategy for the business. Previously, Meera worked in the energy efficiency sector and developed measurement and verification tools to quantify energy savings achieved as a result of measure implementation in non-residential buildings.