The Bellwether Council

The Bellwether Council is a curated group of philanthropic leaders partnering directly with Dean Eric Meyer and the UC Berkeley School of Information to advance the School’s highest-impact priorities.

Council members play an active role in supporting and shaping initiatives across faculty excellence, real-world learning, and South Hall’s future vision — helping the School move quickly on emerging opportunities.

Through a combination of philanthropic support, strategic perspective, and network engagement, Council members help accelerate the School’s growth and impact while strengthening its position as a leading voice at the intersection of technology and society.

2026–2028 Bellwether Council

Gene Alston

Gene Alston is a technology executive and UC Berkeley MIDS alumnus with over 25 years of experience building and scaling global internet platforms.

He previously served as vice president of commerce business and operations at Meta, where he led global strategy, go-to-market, and operations for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Prior to Meta, he held leadership roles at Pinterest, Groupon, and PayPal, working across product, partnerships, and international expansion.

Gene currently serves on the board of Ancestry.com, the Anderson School of Management’s Easton Center Board at UCLA, and is a member of the California State Bar. Gene holds a BS from the University of Washington, a Master of Information & Data Science from UC Berkeley, and a JD/MBA from UCLA. Before attending UCLA, Gene was a naval officer stationed on the USS Worden.

Howard Besser

Howard Besser is a professor emeritus of cinema studies at NYU where he was founding director of its Moving Image Archiving and Preservation MA program.  He has been an information studies educator for 30 years with a focus on the intersection of technology and policy. His Ph.D. is from the UC Berkeley School of Information.

Philip Denkabe

Philip Denkabe is a data and AI executive with extensive experience leading AI, machine learning, and data science functions in fintech, payments, and enterprise technology, including leadership roles at Chime, Visa, HPE Juniper Networking, Cisco and Intel Corp. He holds a Ph.D. and MA in econometrics from NYU and a Master of Information and Data Science from UC Berkeley.

Alan Inouye

Alan advises and writes about federal public policy and the information sector. After completing his Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Information, Alan held policy leadership positions with the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology; and the American Library Association, all in Washington, D.C.

Aditi Khullar

Aditi Khullar is a vice president and quantitative software engineer at Two Sigma, where she works on bridging quantitative research with production systems. She has previously led an engineering team in this space. Over the course of 15+ years in technology, she’s worked across deep learning, natural language processing, and generative AI. At Two Sigma, she’s worked on systems that process billions of documents to power research and helped to scale machine learning infrastructure across the company.

Aditi began her career at Microsoft and Oracle, building a foundation in large-scale systems. She went on to join early-stage startups, where she scaled products, set technical direction, and helped guide teams through successful acquisitions. She holds an master’s in data science from UC Berkeley, an MS in computer science from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and was an entrepreneurship scholar at Chicago Booth School of Business. Beyond her day-to-day work, Aditi is passionate about developing people, mentoring early-career engineers and co-leading discussion groups for employee resource groups at Two Sigma. Aditi has shared her insights as a speaker at PyData NYC, a session chair at KDD Barcelona, and as a panel speaker for the American Statistical Association’s StatFest NYC.

Taylor Ma

Taylor Ma has spent over 15 years in quantitative finance, building large-scale machine learning systems that extract alpha from fundamental, alternative, and behavioral data. At Point72, he leads research across global markets, focused on scaling systematic research through AI. He began his career as a software engineer before moving into quantitative research at Two Sigma Investments, where he built the firm’s early large-scale feature engineering platform from the ground up and helped establish its alternative data alpha research. He holds a Master of Information and Data Science from UC Berkeley and a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon.

Jasmine Qi

Jasmine Qi is a quantitative investor and entrepreneur building an AI startup in quantitative finance. Previously, she served as CEO of Athena Capital Research, where she led quantitative research, trading, and firm operations in New York and Hong Kong. She holds a Master of Information and Data Science from UC Berkeley, an executive MBA from Columbia Business School, and a bachelor’s degree in computational finance with a second major in statistics from Carnegie Mellon University, where she also serves on the advisory board for the B.S. in computational finance program.

Sandra Rivera

Sandra Rivera is a proven leader with more than three decades of technology and semiconductor experience in data center, communications, industrial, automotive, aerospace and defense markets. Most recently, Rivera served as the chief executive officer of Altera, a semiconductor company focused on the development of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that are used across a broad set of infrastructure markets. Prior to Altera, Rivera led Intel’s Data Center and AI Group, where she guided development of data center products including CPUs, GPU

Sekhar Sarukkai

Sekhar Sarukkai is the founder and CEO of ChatSee.ai, where he is helping define runtime assurance for enterprise AI agents. A serial entrepreneur, he previously co-founded Skyhigh Networks, Securent, and Confluent Software. At UC Berkeley, he teaches and mentors graduate students at the School of Information, serves on the external advisory committee of the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC), and advises startups through Berkeley SkyDeck.

Vamsi Sistla

Vamsi Sistla is three-time founder with one exit and over 20 years of engineering leadership. He previously was global head of enterprise AI (PCM) at Nike. Vamsi is currently working on his fourth startup, Symbolic Mind: enterprise software that lets enterprises build and own their own frontier AI at a fraction of today’s cost. He feels fortunate to be part of the I School’s brilliant community and to be able to create value for the school and the community to the best of his abilities.