MIMS 2026 Final Project Showcase: Program

Schedule

Browse project descriptions

Judges

Philip Braddock (MIMS ’16)

Philip Braddock is currently the head of Atlassian for startups.  He has worked at Atlassian since May 2015, when he started as a summer intern during his time in the MIMS program.  Over the past decade plus, he has held several different roles in various departments — among others earlier in his career, Philip previously served as chief of staff to the CFO and then portfolio management lead for Atlassian Ventures.  For the past several years, Philip has hosted a four-part series at the I School called “Building a Company and Venture Capital Investing: An Open Discussion.” He also holds a BA in political science from Vassar College.  

Whether inside or outside the office, Philip is passionate about connecting with people in ways that are truly meaningful (not just tactical). He never hesitates to get up in front of a crowd, which his wife finds both admirable and embarrassing. When not at work, you can find him spending time with his family, traveling to new places or swimming, biking, running, or skiing — his own personal “quad-athalon”.

Darren Cooke

Darren Cooke is UC Berkeley’s chief innovation & entrepreneurship officer. He is also the executive director of the Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center, professional faculty at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, and past chair of the bio track at the Berkeley SkyDeck startup accelerator. He has taught entrepreneurship at Haas and for the Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program for the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. Darren is the past chair of medical device and digital health at Life Science Angels. As an attorney, he led the IP legal team for the life science tools group of Bio-Rad Laboratories, and was a life sciences patent litigator at Covington and Burling. Before law school, he was a mechanical engineer developing cochlear implants at UCSF.

Kate Gage

Kate is the executive director of Higher Ground Institute, which partners with non-profit and civic-engagement organizations to test and adopt emerging technologies and approaches. She was a co-founder and partner at The Movement Cooperative (TMC), which supports hundreds of civil society and advocacy organizations with data & technology. She spent 8 years working in the Obama administration on the intersection between technology and global challenges at USAID and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. 

Ambika Pajjuri

Ambika Pajjuri is a product executive and entrepreneur with roots in deep tech infrastructure and a track record of building products customers love, from consumer devices in millions of homes to developer platforms powering Alexa. At Amazon, she led products and P&L in roles spanning Lab126, AWS, and retail over nearly a decade — these include multiple 0→1 Echo devices and Alexa experiences like multi-room music, impacting 70M+ users; she led the AWS teams that built hands-on developer on-ramps to computer vision, reinforcement learning, and generative AI; and led the retail teams that unlocked a multi-billion-dollar prestige beauty opportunity with elusive brands like Lancôme. Today, Ambika consults with early-stage AI founders to define products and find product-market fit. She serves on the board of Family Caregiver Alliance and is a commissioner in the City of Palo Alto. Ambika earned her MS in electrical engineering from Columbia University and holds six patents.

Galen Panger (Ph.D. ’17)

Galen Panger is a San Francisco-based staff UX researcher at YouTube, where he leads research and represents the user’s perspective in product development for zero-to-one products, including direct messaging, now available within the European Union. He earned his Ph.D. in 2017 from the UC Berkeley School of Information, winning the iSchools Doctoral Dissertation Award for his research on emotion in social media. Outside of work, Galen volunteers with Mission Local and has been quoted recently in outlets such as the New York Times questioning the tech industry’s cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Ashwini Sriram (MIMS ’16)

Ashwini has been a product leader at Fortune 500 companies over the last decade. Her expertise lies in crafting high-quality developer tools and designing scalable API products — skills the MIMS program primed her for! Most recently, she’s been leading AI transformation at Intuit Mailchimp with the deep awareness that artifacts have politics and that technological determinism must be combated. She lives in San Francisco with her partner and many plants, and loves reading and writing Medium posts.