HIGHLIGHTS

• During a free Nov. 5 lecture as part of the Whitton Executive Series, Ghadiyali will share practical lessons from moving between engineering, product leadership and entrepreneurship in a lecture entitled "Building What Doesn't Exist: Lessons in Technology, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation."
• She has learned how to act fast as problems develop, build with purpose, recover when plans break and turn an unconventional path into an advantage.

ROCK HILL, SOUTH CAROLINA - Zainab Ghadiyali '09 knows what it takes to turn ambitious ideas into meaningful innovation.

During a free Nov. 5 lecture as part of the Whitton Executive Series, Ghadiyali will share practical lessons from moving between engineering, product leadership and entrepreneurship in a lecture entitled "Building What Doesn't Exist: Lessons in Technology, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation." She has learned how to act fast as problems develop, build with purpose, recover when plans break and turn an unconventional path into an advantage.

After earning her B.S. in chemistry at Winthrop, the Mumbai native worked in public health and started to pursue a Ph.D. in health economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, expecting a career in medicine. She then changed course after participating in - and winning - an on-campus hackathon competition hosted by Facebook.

Ghadiyali switched to UWM's industrial engineering and computer science graduate programs, immersed herself in the world of engineering and discovered her true passion.

The translation, she has said, was simple: both fields ask you to look at a system, find the broken piece and design the smallest intervention that fixes it.

She has built her career by stepping into problems before the path was clear - from conceptualizing Facebook's first public-health product, to leading Airbnb's re-architecture, to founding companies that break stereotypes and expand access to AI. Living in California, she is the founder of Eat Cook Joy, a platform combining personal chef services with operations software, and she has been an angel investor who has backed companies such as Figma, Zip and Haus Labs.

Ghadiyali co-founded the award-winning non-profit wogrammer, which reaches more than 2 million people and is changing the way stories are told about women by highlighting the technical accomplishments of women in engineering.

As a former tech lead at Facebook, Ghadiyali built products that are used by more than 1.5 billion people. For her work in bridging the gender gap in technology, Ghadiyali was named among the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2015 by Foreign Policy magazine.

In recognition of her accomplishments, Winthrop honored her as its 2017 Outstanding Young Alumni Award recipient.

To reserve a seat to the free Nov. 5 lecture at 11 a.m. in Whitton Auditorium, go to: https://www.winthrop.edu/cbt/whitton-speaker-series.aspx

About the Whitton Series:

Elaine Whitton Davis '73 and Winthrop's College of Business and Technology established a series of training seminars for business leaders in the community and the Charlotte, N.C., region. Sponsored by Davis, the Whitton Executive Series was developed to provide free or low-cost access to current state-of-the-art knowledge relevant to business practice.

For more information, please contact Judy Longshaw, news and media services manager, at [email protected] or call 803/323-2404.