Photography by Bonnie Rae Mills
First Round Review
Wogrammer
Zainab Ghadiyali
Zainab Ghadiyali’s path to a tech leader is anything but conventional. Zainab moved to the United States by herself at the age of 19 with only $107 to her name. Since then, she has supported herself through college and graduate school building a prolific career.
As the Field Operations Manager for the nonprofit Foundation of Medical Relief of Children (FIMRC), she built one of the most profitable business models to provide free pediatric care to children under 5 living in low income neighborhoods.
As an awardee of the prestigious Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst fellowship, she worked in Berlin at the largest university hospital in Europe studying Chinese Acupuncture and publishing research in Psychosomatic Medicine.
As a Tech Lead at Facebook, Zainab built products that are used by more than 1.5 billion people. If you have used Facebook, you have probably interacted with something she has built. She is currently a Product Lead at Airbnb where she is responsible for one of the company’s key initiatives. During her time in Silicon Valley, Zainab co-founded the award-winning non-profit wogrammer, which reaches more than four million people and is changing the way stories are told about women in STEM.
Zainab holds a bachelors degree in Chemistry from Winthrop University in South Carolina, and graduate degrees in Industrial Engineering and Computer Science from University of Wisconsin-Madison. For her work in bridging the gender gap in technology, Zainab was listed by Foreign Policy magazine among the Top 100 Global thinkers of 2015.
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