Originally, Togzhan is from Kentau, South Kazakhstan. She moved from there at 18 years old to study Economics at Nazarbayev University. Upon graduating with honors she moved to New York City where she studied Data Science at Columbia University. She started her career in New York City at a small startup, where she had a chance to create projects for big companies like Bloomberg and even participate in Mayor Bloomberg's presidential run. Currently, she is a Data Scientist in a private equity sector, where she helps increase value of the company's portfolio.

I used to be a Deep Learning Scientist in a medical startup where I worked on medical data and images. On a side note, I work as a mentor at Yandex Practicum where I help students with learning about Data Science. My Telegram blog covers topics such as Data Science and Machine Learning using guides and practical tips.

Valerii Babushkin joined Facebook in November 2020 as the WhatApp User Data Privacy Tech Lead. Before Facebook, Valerii was the VP of Machine Learning at Alibaba Russia, Senior Director of Data Science at X5 Retail Group.

Also, Valerii is a Kaggle competition Grand Master, ranked globally in the top 30.

Currently, Aidana works as a Product Manager for a SaaS startup based in San Francisco with 6 million users worldwide. Her experience includes PM-ing at arbuz.kz, building her own hardware startup, working at Power Electronics Research Laboratory, and interning at a solar power plant. Aidana got her bachelor's degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Nazarbayev University ('18), and will soon start her master's degree studies at MIT ('23). In the past 2 years, Aidana organized +15 free lectures and workshops on product management and design thinking for Kazakhstani youngsters and social entrepreneurs.

Nazerke is a former venture capital Analyst and Software Engineer at Google where she worked on Chrome for iOS. She authored four articles on robotics and was a speaker at international conferences in Japan, Singapore and USA. Nazerke moderated UNICEF panel discussions regarding Data for Children. In 2017, she participated in Grace Hopper Celebration in Orlando and won the Anita Borg scholarship. Nazerke made it to the semifinals of ACM ICPC, a world championship in coding. Moreover, she was the Regional Ambassador for Kazakhstan at the Technovation Challenge. Today is working on a startup called L’accent.

Dr. Anna Kostikova is a Director of Data Science at Novartis, one the global pharmaceutical company. She leads data science team at Novartis and previously grew data science teams for such industry leaders as Booking.com and Heineken. She holds PhD in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and founded successful deep tech startup, InsideDNA - one of the winners of TechCrush Disrupt Competition, in London 2016. She currently serves as board member for Asylia Diagnostics - innovative cancer-focused precision medicine biotech company. She actively promotes and supports women in STEM and coaches early career professionals to start their career in data science, ML and AI via her YouTube channel (Life of a Data Scientist).

Being originally from Moscow, Sasha is a university of Westminster (London) graduate who decided to change her life and move to Tashkent, Uzbekistan; she subsequently fell in love with the Central Asian region. In Tashkent, she was working in IT Park Uzbekistan as the Head of Investments and External Projects team – she was responsible for developing the venture industry and was closely working with startups. She also was the main force behind Tumaris.Tech – a project dedicated to women in tech. After Sasha left IT Park, she started working as an individual consultant for international organisations, including UNDP. In March 2021, she founded Peri Tech, which aims to develop female technical entrepreneurship in Central Asia and beyond. Currently, Sasha is also working at Data Art as a solutions consultant.

Mukaddam Akhmedova is a digital nomad, who works in IT and travels to explore new cultures, markets and minds.

Kathy Giori is an EdTech and IoT Entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley. She volunteers her time to support and evangelize MicroBlocks, Web Things, PlatformIO, and other favorite open source tools and projects. She wants to bring better STEM education to students around the world, and better privacy to consumers of smart home products and services.

She is a passionate advocate for open source software, hardware, and STEM learning that is accessible to all.Kathy most recently worked at Mozilla, and before that held senior product and engineering positions at Arduino, Qualcomm, a few startups, and began her career in research at SRI International. She holds a bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, and a Masters in EE from Stanford.

Nilufar is developing tech-education sphere in the country: she was the first one who started holding an international NASA Hackathon in Tajikistan and attractting young people to international tech programs.

Nilufar and her team organized the first largest online Makerspace course and curriculum in Tajikistan. Through Makerspace projects, Dushanbe engages young people in innovative technologies like 3D, programming, virtual reality, electronics and robotics.

Takhmina worked as a video journalist for a major media outlet, and now I am an audio and video content specialist for an international organization.

In 2018, she started shooting mobile video, a couple of months later she picked up a camera and shot her first short documentary "Pudina", which received a golden tulip for best debut. Already working in the media, she shot another short documentary film one day in the life of a cleaning woman from DEU "Bibichon".

Quite recently, a new 17-minute work was published about three Tajik girls, female students studying abroad, but because of the pandemic, they were stuck in their homeland and how they turned this situation for their better side "in spite of". In addition, Takhmina is a video filming and editing coach.

But the most important achievement at the moment I consider our photo and video project GRAIN with Farrukh Safarzade - about people from our society who love their work. Recently, we even managed to present this project within the walls of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg within the framework of the forum of young journalists "Dialogue of Cultures".