Keynote Address: Kathy Pham

Image

Kathy Pham is a computer scientist, product leader, and entrepreneur who has held roles in product management, software engineering, data science, consulting, and leadership across the private, non-profit, and public sectors. In 2024, she received Anitab.org’s highest honor: the Technical Leadership Abie Award for leading or developing a product, process, or innovation that made a notable impact on business or society. She is the Vice-President of Artificial Intelligence at Workday, serves as Senior Advisor at Mozilla, and is a faculty member at Harvard University. In government, Kathy was appointed the inaugural Executive Director of the National AI Advisory Committee, served as the Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the Federal Trade Commission, was appointed to a generative AI Taskforce, and was a founding product and engineering member of the United States Digital Service at the White House.

Kathy’s private sector leadership has spanned Google, IBM, and Harris Healthcare. Kathy has served on the advisory boards of Blue Tulip Ventures, the Anita Borg Institute, the Georgia Tech College of Computing, the “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck” initiative, Civic Signals, Startups and Society, FWD50, and Fortune 500 companies. Kathy was the Co-Founder and Co-Lead of the Responsible Computer Science Challenge and founder of the Mozilla Builders Incubator at Mozilla. She also co-founded the Ethical Tech Working Group at Harvard and focuses on ethics and social responsibility with an emphasis on engineering culture, artificial intelligence, and computer science curricula. She was a Fellow in Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence at the MIT Media Lab and Berkman Klein Center, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and communities, and a Civic Science Fellow at the Rita Allen Foundation. Kathy is a Shorenstein Center Senior Fellow and Adjunct Faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she teaches Product Management and Society.

Kathy is a proud soccer coach, partner, parent of three, and daughter of Vietnamese refugees. In 2021, Kathy established an endowment at Georgia Tech for computer science majors with demonstrated financial need. The Mary Hương Thị Phạm Scholarship is awarded annually and honors Pham's late mother, Mary, and "single parents, and resilient fighters who push for the best for themselves, their families, and their societies."

Kathy completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in Computer Science at Georgia Tech (Atlanta, Georgia) and Supelec (Metz, France).