We are thrilled to invite you to our Round Table with WiE Leaders! Join us for insightful discussions with two UW professors and two industry professionals from different engineering areas, who will share their stories and perspectives on Career Development and Leadership. Snacks and refreshments provided! Please register in advance to guarantee your spot.
Meet the panelists:
Andrea Scott, Ph.D.
Associate professor - Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering.
K. Andrea Scott (Member, IEEE) received her B.A.Sc, M.A.Sc and PhD all in mechanical engineering. She was a Post-Doctoral Researcher with the Data Assimilation and Satellite Meteorology Research Section, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Canada, where she was part of a team involved in the development of a sea ice data assimilation system. In 2012, she joined the Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, as a Faculty Member, with a specialization in remote sensing, data-driven approaches and deep learning. She is now in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, where she continues to work on these topics, with emphasis on bringing in physics to the data-driven problem space.
Jane Ravenshaw, MASc, P.Eng.
President, One-two-five Inc.
Jane graduated from Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto in 1985, became a professional engineer in 1988 and received her Master of Management Science from University of Waterloo in 1990.
She spent the first 10 years of her career at General Motors, working as an Industrial Engineer and Manager of Industrial Engineering. She also had a one-year stint in service marketing, which became quite relevant later in her career.
She moved to Nortel Networks in manufacturing of circuit boards. After one year, she moved to a product role and over 6 years worked her way to Director of Program Management for data products.
When things turned side-ways for Nortel, she jumped to a completely different role in a marketing agency--The Marketing Store. There she led the build of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) program for Nissan North America as Technical Director. She was able to move up over the next 10 years to COO for North America, building the most profitable agency in the global network.
In 2014, she branched out on her own, starting a consulting firm one-two-five inc., focusing on the cross section of technology, marketing and customer experience.
Jane completed a Masters certificate in Executive coaching in 2013 and has mentored and coached many young women. She currently works as a coach for the Woman in Leadership Programme at Oxford University and is a volunteer mentor for women entrepreneurs at The Forum. She sits on the Board for the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers and acts as a Board advisor for a number of small technology companies.
Sandra Poole, MASc, P.Eng.
Chief Operating Officer, Mythic Therapeutics
Sandra Poole is a biotech executive with extensive strategic, technical, and operational leadership experience in drug development, manufacturing, and new company building. She has led and supported teams through the product development and regulatory approval of several notable biological products across multiple therapeutic areas including oncology and rare genetic diseases, while advancing a range of novel technology platforms including antibody drug conjugates, protein therapeutics, and cell and gene therapies.
Since 2020, Ms. Poole has been serving as the Chief Operating Officer of Mythic Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on the development of novel antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) for cancer therapy. Prior to joining Mythic, Ms. Poole was Chief Operating Officer at LogicBio, a biotechnology company developing novel viral vector-based gene editing therapies for rare genetic diseases.
Prior to LogicBio, Ms. Poole held executive roles of increasing responsibility at ImmunoGen Inc, a biotechnology company developing ADCs, ultimately becoming Executive Vice President of Technical Operations and Commercial Development. Before joining Immunogen, Ms. Poole spent more than 15 years in CMC technical development and manufacturing leadership positions at Genzyme (now Sanofi), culminating in the role of Senior Vice President of Biologics Manufacturing, overseeing global manufacturing of six commercial products across five manufacturing sites in the US and EU.
Ms. Poole holds a master’s and bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Waterloo (Canada). She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Travere Therapeutics, and previously served as independent board director for ViaCyte Inc. (acquired by Vertex Pharmaceuticals) and Valneva SE.
Sirisha Rambhatla, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor – Department of Management Science and Engineering
Sirisha Rambhatla is the Director of the Critical Machine Learning (ML) Lab and an Assistant Professor in the Management Science and Engineering Department at the University of Waterloo (UW) with cross-appointments in Systems Design Engineering, and the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. Her research focuses on developing reliable ML and artificial intelligence (AI) models for critical real-world decision-making in surgery, transplantation and healthcare, intelligent manufacturing, and aviation using computer vision, time-series and spatiotemporal modelling, representation learning, and explainable AI. With her research supported by industry and clinical collaborations, Dr. Rambhatla brings her ML/AI expertise to build the next generation of theory-guided data-driven solutions for the real world. Her inter-disciplinary work spanning both theory and practice of ML, has been published at top ML venues such as ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, IJCAI, AAAI, and clinical venues such as AMIA, Urology Clinics North America, Surgery, and American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. Recipient of the 2021 Merit Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Research at the University of Southern California across Science and Engineering, Dr. Rambhatla received her Ph.D. and Master’s in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota -- Twin Cities in 2019 and 2012, respectively, where she was the recipient of the E. Bruce Lee Memorial Fellowship.