Our Committees
Our WiTWA Patron
works tirelessly to ensure that we develop a more diverse STEM and Innovation community.
Professor Lyn Beazley
We are incredibly proud to have Professor Lyn Beazley, AO FTSE, inductee of the Western Australian Science Hall of Fame and former Chief Scientist of WA, as the Patron of Women in Technology WA and Champion of Techtrails. For Professor Lyn Beazley, science is a lifelong passion. After graduating from Oxford and Edinburgh, Lyn has dedicated over 30 years to neuroscience, researching recovery from brain injury and changing clinical practice in the treatment of premature infants.
As Western Australia’s Chief Scientist from 2006 to 2013, Lyn advised governments on science and innovation, worked closely with industry and was a science ambassador in Australia and internationally. Lyn has been determined to demonstrate that science is not just a theoretical exercise, but a practical one too. She helped establish a nationwide ‘hotline’ for school laboratory technicians, worked for healthier waterways by establishing Dolphin Watch, spearheaded a program supplying microscopes to over 450 primary schools and introduced the international science communication competition Famelab to Australia. Lyn was also part of the negotiating team that ensured Australia would co-host the Square Kilometre Array of radio-telescopes, the world’s largest science endeavour. Lyn’s goal is for every Australian child to learn and love science.
WiTWA Central Committee
is a collection of inspiring women who guide WiTWA both from a strategic perspective and in our day-to-day initiatives.
Tina Ambrose
Tina started her WiTWA journey attending events when she arrived in Perth in January 2016. A huge fan of the WiTWA Community from the outset, Tina always championed the organisation to her network. In January 2019, Tina formally joined the WiTWA Communications Sub-Committee, where she took on responsibility for developing social media marketing. In December 2019, Tina took on the role of Communications Lead. In November 2020, when the wonderful Pia Turcinov stepped down as Chair in November 2020, Tina proudly joined Kay Hargreaves as Co-Chair of WiTWA. She is immensely proud of the WiTWA’s growth since her joining in 2019 and is grateful to be surrounded by such a fantastic team across the WiTWA Committees and Sub-Committees.
Tina is also the Founder and CEO of WA’s leading technology recruitment agency for customer experience – Valrose. Tina and the Valrose team are driven by the purpose of improving the perception of recruiters globally on a mission to add value to every company and person they work with.
Kay Hargreaves
Kay specialises in transforming the way organisations collect, manage, use and apply data. With over 30 years working and consulting experience in digital data, Kay is passionate about technology and uses her natural enthusiasm for continuous improvement and her technical experience to help organisations gain a competitive advantage through innovation. Kay encourages people to question normality and promotes collaboration to generate new ideas that improve productivity and lead organisations towards high performance.
Sasha Johnson
Maree Morrell
Maree has extensive accounts experience having worked for over 20 years in both the petrochemical industry in NZ and the engineering industry in Western Australia. She volunteered on her local P&C for ten years, during which time she gained experience in retail management and customer service. She has recently graduated from Murdoch University with an IT degree majoring in Cyber Forensics and Information Security. She strongly believes in the value of teaching young people to move beyond simply using technology, to utilising it as a tool to create their future. Maree is a passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion.
Alana Atkinson
Alana is passionate about the empowerment of tech for the community & the economy. As an Account Manager at AWS, Alana is privileged to work with AWS customers in Western and South Australia to help them understand the value of cloud technology from both an economic and business transformation perspective.
She is passionate about technology innovation and its potential to enable positive economic and social impact. Prior to AWS Alana has enjoyed many years working in Account Management roles in Perth including with NEXTDC, Dimension Data, Alphawest/Optus and Westcon Group.
Alana is also passionate about diversity and inclusion.
Michelle Radley
Michelle has a Bachelor of Business degree majoring in Accounting. Prior to joining Rio Tinto Michelle had a successful career in the accounting and finance sector. She branched into mining in 2008 when she joined Rio Tinto Iron Ore as the Joint Venture Manager for the Hope Downs project. During her time at Rio Tinto, Michelle has held a number of management roles, all of which required significant influencing skills to deliver results without having direct control and leadership over resources or teams and she has successfully moved between corporate and operations focused roles. Michelle has just embarked on her latest challenge as the Pilbara Mines business partner. This role is an opportunity to continue the work she was doing in the technology integration role she has held for a number of years and help to shape the Iron Ore business and the IS&T business into the future.
Charlene Clarke
Passionate Visionary and Innovator
Charlene is a Founding Partner and Chief Vision Officer for Exodus Tech, a saas based technology company focused on designing simple yet innovative software solutions that connect people, communities and companies through technology.
With more than 10 years’ experience in human resources, coupled with graduate and post-graduate studies in human resources, small business management and entrepreneurship, Charlene has developed an eco-system of social enterprises focused on creating an empowered community.
JobActivator is the flagship project for Exodus Tech, bringing a fully automated resume builder and management system to market, built around human resource frameworks.
Charlene is the Managing Director of Catalyst Central, supporting small businesses with HR guidance to build a platform for sustainable growth, believing Everything is Possible with the Right People Focus.
Arna Jade
Arna is the founder of docushop & Soto Group and brings innovative business and planning processes to clients. She has 20 years of international experience in tech startups, and senior business management in B2B, B2C, and government contracting businesses.
Arna spent several years as an executive overseeing a multi-million dollar global technology business. In this role, Arna and her team delivered a world-first project in data security and management – building a data centre in Reliance Oil & Gas and transcribing over 4 petabytes of legacy data. She defied the odds and continues to do so while finding her life-work balance to achieve constant personal growth and lasting business results.
Arna is a passionate advocate for teaching people how to work smarter and not harder, and build businesses that reduce their workload, not increase it.
Communications Subcommittee
makes our digital presence happen, whether that is LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Newsletter or website.
Teagen McEwan
Teagen is an events management queen and digital marketing professional, honing her skills in digital promotion for events including website development and design, apps and social media. She specialises in email marketing, conversion funnel analytics, website development, search engine optimisation and social media marketing using Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Teagen’s extensive experience in engagement at events allows her to build support for digital tactics, leading to increased event activation and improved ROI. Teagen enjoys continuously innovating in event spaces using new technologies to build engagement with clients, allowing traditional marketing tactics to support activation and increase lead captures. She uses organic content and advertising to target audiences, event registrations, raises event capacity and online conversations through showcased live streaming.
Recently, Teagen received a scholarship as part of the She Codes Plus 2020 program and She Codes Flash 2019 program, which were intensive programs learning web design to build personal portfolios with HTML/CSS, Python programming used to create machine learning programs, building interactive web applications with Python and Django, cloud deployment of projects, storage of code in GIT, adding interactive functionality to web apps with REACT js, and hardware programming with MicroPython.
Alex Graham-Wright
Digital. User Experience. Web Development
Alex has over 20 years of experience in the digital domain with a background in web design & development. From the age of 16, she has taught herself everything she knows about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, User Experience and more and has put this knowledge to use working on a range of campaigns for government, community and business clients. Alex has worked with digital, advertising and communications agencies, and state government as well as 10 years running her own small web design & development agency. Her work has been recognised by the Guild of Accessible Web Designers, West Australian Web Awards, Australian Web Awards, CSS Design Awards, Awards awards and the PADC Skulls.
Mitra Aspandiar
Having worked in creative agencies, education, and now software technology – Mitra’s marketing experience has been wide and varied. Completing her Honours thesis on consumer personality traits towards ethical labelling, she’s working on better understanding consumer behaviour and the way consumers respond to marketing activities.
Events
Subcommittee
are the welcoming faces at all events who work hard to make sure the events happen and we all feel welcome and valued.
Alana Atkinson
Alana is passionate about the empowerment of tech for the community & the economy. As an Account Manager at AWS, Alana is privileged to work with AWS customers in Western and South Australia to help them understand the value of cloud technology from both an economic and business transformation perspective.
She is passionate about technology innovation and its potential to enable positive economic and social impact. Prior to AWS Alana has enjoyed many years working in Account Management roles in Perth including with NEXTDC, Dimension Data, Alphawest/Optus and Westcon Group.
Alana is also passionate about diversity and inclusion.
Imogen Bartlett
Imogen’s career has spanned many varying roles in the ICT industry as well as spending a number of years to managing a not-for-profit. She has enjoyed applying her skill set to both sectors and still has a strong commitment to social responsibility both in and out of work. She is driven to continue to seek opportunities to assist the next generation, specifically in the areas of STEM and championing diversity. Most recently she has taken on the role of Program Manager for a partnership between industry and the tertiary education sector in Artificial Intelligence research and is excited to see what it can showcase, teach and develop for the future. She is well known for her ability to help translate between different industries and sectors and this passion has seen Imogen take up a role on the WiTWA events committee. She is looking forward to growing the mini-mentoring program initiative in the coming months.
Natasha Fergusson
Natasha is an experienced marketing professional with a wealth of Perth tech industry experience. She is passionate about cyber security and its role in providing businesses with continued success and operational stability – making it easier for users to do the right thing and/or harder for them to do the wrong thing. A welcoming environment, new learning opportunities and meeting like-minded professionals is what Natasha loves about WiTWA. She strongly supports WiTWA’s role in encouraging young people to consider technology as a stimulating and viable profession. She is especially keen to smash gender stereotypes amongst lower primary school kids, showing girls and boys that, no matter their gender, they can enjoy and succeed at tech too. Natasha believes events are a powerful way to communicate, educate, inspire and entertain. This is especially true this year with the WiTWA theme of “If you can see her, you can be her”.
Raissa Amaral
Raissa is a Senior Technology Consultant at Visagio, she holds a Bachelor in Computer Science, with great interest in making technological solutions understandable by anyone. She has led and developed projects ranging from web development, data visualisation and data analytics. She is passionate about building interfaces that make user’s lives better, and why not, prettier?! When offline, she loves spending her time doing some (sometimes successful, sometimes not) house DIY’s.
Techtrails Subcommittee
make sure that our Techtrails STEM school incursions run smoothly and provide value to participants and the community.
Kay Hargreaves
Kay specialises in transforming the way organisations collect, manage, use and apply data. With over 30 years working and consulting experience in digital data, Kay is passionate about technology and uses her natural enthusiasm for continuous improvement and her technical experience to help organisations gain a competitive advantage through innovation. Kay encourages people to question normality and promotes collaboration to generate new ideas that improve productivity and lead organisations towards high performance.
Heidy Sands
Heidy is a highly creative, systems-loving and business savvy Digital Strategist but you can consider her your online biz bestie.
With over 15 years of experience working across various industries and sectors, she now focuses on supporting purposeful businesses to navigate the digital world from systems to marketing and empowering them with understanding their data better.
The role that Heidy has created allows her to connect, collaborate and glow up online presences for small businesses.
Teagen McEwan
Teagen is an events management queen and digital marketing professional, honing her skills in digital promotion for events including website development and design, apps and social media. She specialises in email marketing, conversion funnel analytics, website development, search engine optimisation and social media marketing using Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Teagen’s extensive experience in engagement at events allows her to build support for digital tactics, leading to increased event activation and improved ROI. Teagen enjoys continuously innovating in event spaces using new technologies to build engagement with clients, allowing traditional marketing tactics to support activation and increase lead captures. She uses organic content and advertising to target audiences, event registrations, raises event capacity and online conversations through showcased live streaming.
Recently, Teagen received a scholarship as part of the She Codes Plus 2020 program and She Codes Flash 2019 program, which were intensive programs learning web design to build personal portfolios with HTML/CSS, Python programming used to create machine learning programs, building interactive web applications with Python and Django, cloud deployment of projects, storage of code in GIT, adding interactive functionality to web apps with REACT js, and hardware programming with MicroPython.
Courtney Carr
Courtney is a passionate Project Manager in the IT industry, who loves to be challenged and is constantly asking questions.
As a consultant, Courtney also gets to be involved in business analysis and change management work. She loves to work on projects that involve next-generation technology and ways of working. The learning never stops, and you have a lot of fun on the way to delivering great outcomes for clients.
Courtney cares deeply about social impact and is driven by her desire to see social justice. She is always looking for ways to educate herself and others on the power of diversity, how to be more inclusive, and strategies for making necessary change happen.
Tracy Rothery
Business Development Manager, Green Light. Tracy specialises in transforming the way businesses manage, use and apply IT Solutions. With over 10 years working and consulting in the Development and Technology space. She has been reconised with national company awards from her time working at Telsra and ANZ. Tracy is passionate about technology and uses her passion and enthusiasm for growth and her technical experience to help businesses to attain ICT resources, services and projects. Tracy uses her enthusiasm for technology and people to help transform business relations.
Debbie Yates
Debbie Yates is a passionate STEM Educator and previous Teacher of the Year award winner. She believes in creating authentic and innovative experiences for her students and leads by example, supporting and inspiring colleagues to develop their practice.
Conference & Awards Subcommittee
work tirelessly throughout the year to ensure that our conference happens, steering us towards an inspiring and eventful day.
Michelle Radley
Michelle has a Bachelor of Business degree majoring in Accounting. Prior to joining Rio Tinto Michelle had a successful career in the accounting and finance sector. She branched into mining in 2008 when she joined Rio Tinto Iron Ore as the Joint Venture Manager for the Hope Downs project. During her time at Rio Tinto, Michelle has held a number of management roles, all of which required significant influencing skills to deliver results without having direct control and leadership over resources or teams and she has successfully moved between corporate and operations focused roles. Michelle has just embarked on her latest challenge as the Pilbara Mines business partner. This role is an opportunity to continue the work she was doing in the technology integration role she has held for a number of years and help to shape the Iron Ore business and the IS&T business into the future.
Gry Stene
Gry is a thought leader in digital transformation and product management. With over 30 years in the tech industry, Gry is the linchpin in communication between business and tech. Uniquely in the ‘tech space’, Gry is unwaveringly committed to driving social change.
She is a tech communications coach and a mentor to women and young people who share her passion to redefine STEM as STEAM – injecting arts and humanity into conventional Science, Technology Engineering and Maths. In this way Gry is able to create real opportunities for women or those previously overlooked within traditional tech roles.
Kate Kirwin
Kate is a passionate advocate for women in STEM and the innovation ecosystem. Founder of She Codes, she has led the steep growth of the project since 2015. Thanks to her work, more than 5000 women have learnt to code through free programs. She has hustled to source more than $1 million from the government and industry to support women in STEM activities. With a regional upbringing, she strongly believes in empowering women from the world’s remotest regions, from as far north as Port Hedland and Karratha, and east as far as Brisbane. Kate has also contributed to the growth of Spacecubed, and since 2014 has played a pivotal role in building community and coordinating other programs including Plus Eight, Startup Weekend, Meshpoints. Kate was recently awarded a Business News 40under40 award, the West Australian Rising Star award and was a runner up for the 2019 and 2020 Seven News Young Achiever Awards.
Rebecca Beardsley
Rebecca is passionate about supporting entrepreneurs and innovators, and has taken the lead in facilitating the growth and development of various sectors through initiatives that aim to connect, inspire and educate. With over 15 years of experience in marketing, Rebecca brings both a creative and strategic approach to her work, and looks forward to furthering her ambitions through working with WiTWA. Rebecca is excited by the prospect of seeing more women in tech, science and innovation, and working alongside the amazing women at the organisation to support sector growth and career progression for women in WA.
Karolina Plange-Korndorfer
Karolina is a highly competent, motivated and dedicated Treasury professional with years of experience within the Finance sector. Her can-do attitude and financial analysis abilities allow her to operate with a level head, enabling her to take on any task and complete it thoroughly and with the highest level of quality.
Karolina believes that together we can help our next generation drive for equal opportunity and a more diverse workforce. We need to lead by example and help each other and female professionals around us to speak up and be bold.
Belinda Knowles
Stellar organisation and management skills and years of professional experience in managing the delivery of software and business operations solutions, I’ve worked from different locations around Australia and Singapore, providing consistent, quality services to businesses globally and virtually. Now back in Perth, I enjoy travelling whenever I can, and if the travel involves meeting up with family and friends for wine, coffee, and dark chocolate, even better.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Subcommittee
are looking at what we can do to support D&I initiatives for other organisations and help promote diverse and inclusive cultures.
Charlene Clarke
Passionate Visionary and Innovator
Charlene is a Founding Partner and Chief Vision Officer for Exodus Tech, a saas based technology company focused on designing simple yet innovative software solutions that connect people, communities and companies through technology.
With more than 10 years’ experience in human resources, coupled with graduate and post-graduate studies in human resources, small business management and entrepreneurship, Charlene has developed an eco-system of social enterprises focused on creating an empowered community.
JobActivator is the flagship project for Exodus Tech, bringing a fully automated resume builder and management system to market, built around human resource frameworks.
Charlene is the Managing Director of Catalyst Central, supporting small businesses with HR guidance to build a platform for sustainable growth, believing Everything is Possible with the Right People Focus.
Heidi Pass, PhD
Heidi is a passionate leader, inspiring pioneer and positive role model in her industry. One of two women globally to achieve the role of Chief Geochemist at a major mining company, she loves unlocking the earth’s secrets through geochemistry. A PhD-qualified geologist-geochemist, Heidi’s adventurous spirit has taken her from Arctic wilderness to rugged Australian Outback. Forward-thinking and embracing the value of diversity in the STEM pipeline, Heidi led the development of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists National Mentoring Program. Now, selected as 1 of 95 women worldwide for Homeward Bound 2019, a ground-breaking leadership initiative for women in STEM, Heidi has strategically positioned herself. Joining a global network increasing the impact professionals with science backgrounds have in leadership positions.
Amy Green
Amy is passionate about empowering and inspiring others to think big; to push boundaries and imagine new, transformative ways of doing things. With over 15 years’ experience working for global technology companies including Hewlett Packard and AWS, Amy possesses a wealth of knowledge and expertise in large-scale cloud transformation and digitalisation. A true thought leader, Amy enables her clients to unlock significant business value, and empowers those she works with to achieve the best possible outcome.
Amy’s own company, “Atomic Inspire” helps women elevate their confidence, articulate their brand message and lead from a place of purpose and intent. Her articles have been published in SmartCompany Magazine.
Niamh Toohey
She facilitates executive decision making & prioritisation of digital investments, designing agile operating models and offering both team & individual coaching to create Agile, Inclusive Workplaces.
Niamh believes in strengths based leadership, with diversity for balance and candour to bring the best out in teams.
Partnerships Subcommittee
is your go-to team for anything partnerships.
Teagen McEwan
Teagen is an events management queen and digital marketing professional, honing her skills in digital promotion for events including website development and design, apps and social media. She specialises in email marketing, conversion funnel analytics, website development, search engine optimisation and social media marketing using Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Teagen’s extensive experience in engagement at events allows her to build support for digital tactics, leading to increased event activation and improved ROI. Teagen enjoys continuously innovating in event spaces using new technologies to build engagement with clients, allowing traditional marketing tactics to support activation and increase lead captures. She uses organic content and advertising to target audiences, event registrations, raises event capacity and online conversations through showcased live streaming.
Recently, Teagen received a scholarship as part of the She Codes Plus 2020 program and She Codes Flash 2019 program, which were intensive programs learning web design to build personal portfolios with HTML/CSS, Python programming used to create machine learning programs, building interactive web applications with Python and Django, cloud deployment of projects, storage of code in GIT, adding interactive functionality to web apps with REACT js, and hardware programming with MicroPython.
