Moderated by Tara Akhavan, CEO, Faurecia IRYStec
Alyson Freeman leads the environmental sustainability strategy for data center and infrastructure solution products. She identifies new growth areas, initiatives, and emerging opportunities to enhance the sustainability of Dell Technologies products and services, optimizes existing solutions, and defines next generation initiatives. She has 20 years’ experience in engineering and management roles at NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Samsung, and Intel. Her Ph.D. is in electronic materials with a focus on semiconductors. Freeman is also the North America Lead for the Women in Technology employee resource group at Dell Technologies, a co-founder and former chair of Women in Technology at Samsung Austin Semiconductor, and a board member of Westwood STEM Academy. She also co-founded a global Coding for Kids program at Dell Technologies.
Mary Loomas joined Micron in February of 2021 as CVP of finance, leading Micron’s corporate finance and treasury organizations. As an experienced finance executive, she helps Micron deliver results through business partnering, strong process discipline, finance technology innovation using AI/ML, and strong cash management practices. Prior to Micron, Loomas led Kateeva’s finance organization starting in 2018. In late 2019 Loomas was promoted to the company’s CFO and corporate secretary positions, where she led Kateeva’s finance, legal, and IT organizations. As CFO she led the restructuring of the company, including fundraising and the development and implementation of a new strategy. Before Kateeva, Loomas spent 17+ years at Intel Corporation, where she held several leadership roles. Most recently, she led Intel’s global revenue team and was responsible for revenue forecasting and accounting, global field sales finance, and sales risk management. She left Intel in 2004 to start an artisan chocolate company, returning to Intel in 2011. Loomas began her finance career at BAE Systems. She holds a B.A. in economics/management science from UC San Diego and an MBA in finance from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Farnaz Niroui is an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research pushes the limits of nanoscale engineering by developing new fabrication techniques to reach dimensions at the atomic scale, and utilizing the emerging phenomena to engineer new paradigms of active nanoscale devices and systems. Prior to MIT, Niroui was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT and completed her undergraduate studies in nanotechnology engineering at University of Waterloo. Niroui has been the recipient of awards including the Miller Research Fellowship and the NSF CAREER Award.
Tara Akhavan is a visionary award-winning technology entrepreneur and pioneer in the field of perceptual display processing for the consumer and automotive industry. She is the CEO of Faurecia IRYStec, Inc., (formerly known as IRYStec, Inc.), an innovation center that was acquired by Faurecia in April 2020. Tara founded IRYStec in 2015 and served as CTO for five years to introduce eye-friendly display technology to the automotive industry. She has a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, a master’s degree in artificial intelligence, and a Ph.D. in image processing and computer vision from Vienna University of Technology. Akhavan is the Canadian committee member for the International Committee for Illumination (CIE) and the marketing vice chair for the Society for Information Display. She was recognized as an Entrepreneur of the Year in 2019 by EoY Canada and as the founder of Top 20 Innovative Start-Ups in Canada in 2018 by CIX, Canada’s largest investor conference.