Women In Data Science

Though Karina showed an early aptitude in math, her high school counselor advised her against pursuing an engineering degree. She ignored his advice and went on to earn her undergrad degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Rhode Island and a PhD in Aeronautics from Caltech. She landed her first job as a speech-to-text engineer at TRW where she was awarded her first patent. She then moved on to technology transfer as a patent agent at the Jet Propulsion Lab. She bounced back to academia, managing corporate partnerships for Caltech, and then returned to industry as Google’s University Lead for Google Cloud AI/Machine Learning. She is now at SAP as Global Head of Academies and University Alliances, continuing to connect industry and academia.In her diverse career spanning business and education, she has seen increasing power concentrated in big tech companies through their ownership of immense datasets and computational power. Companies are also attracting talent away from universities that are n