On October 30, 2019, Fairfield University’s brand new Charles F. Dolan School of Business hosted a special breakfast roundtable discussion “Celebrating Women Leaders in Technology.” This event, presented by Future Tech Enterprise and HP, featured female leaders from major financial, manufacturing, and technology companies who shared advice for success within the field, stories of overcoming challenges, and tips for how schools and employers can better support the next generation of female technology leaders. Students, faculty, and community members were in attendance.
The event was hosted by Donna Leonard, VP of Future Tech, and Allison Cohen, the events manager at Channel Company, who led the discussion with six women leaders in the technology field. The six speakers included: Andrea Ayala, a channel manager at Datto, Inc., which is a cybersecurity and data backup company.
Cristina Dolan is the CEO and founder of InsideCHAINS, which works with organizations to create solutions and new business models with unique value propositions.
Vanessa Forbes ’07 works as a print sustainability and graphics solutions communications lead at HP.
Lori Groth is CIO, Industrial, at Stanley Black and Decker. She works to facilitate technology needs for Stanley Engineered Fastening, Stanley Infrastructure, and Stanley Oil and Gas business units.
Francesca Lancer is CFO of Hive IO, a company that effectively balances the requirements for enterprise IT with security and cost to offer a simplistic, effective software-defined datacenter solution.
Devra Sisitsky is the executive director and founder of Makerspace CT, which combines manufacturing equipment, community, and education for the purposes of enabling community members to design, prototype, and create manufactured works.