Kathy Pham is a product leader, computer scientist, and founder who has held roles in product management, software engineering, data science, consulting, and leadership in the private, non-profit, and public sectors. She was named the 2024 ABIE Technical Leadership Award Recipient, following recent past recipient Drs. Feifei Li (Stanford), Daphne Koller (Coursera), Lisa Su (AMD), Margaret Burnett (ACM and OSU), and Nuria Oliver (ELLIS Alicante Foundation). Kathy was a founding product and engineering member of the United States Digital Service, where she served across three presidential administrations. Kathy currently serves as the Workday Vice President of Artificial Intelligence. Most recently, she was appointed the inaugural Executive Director of the United States National AI Advisory Committee, tasked with advising the United States President and the National AI Initiative Office. Previously, she served as the Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the Federal Trade Commission. Kathy also serves as a Senior Advisor at Mozilla.
Kathy's expertise lies at the intersection of technology, ethics, and responsibility, with a focus on ethical principles in practice in product management, design, and engineering. Her experience and leadership has spanned Mozilla, Google (Search, Health, and People Operations), IBM, Harris Healthcare, and the federal government at the United States Digital Service, where she was a founding product and engineering member. She has founded the Ethical Tech Collective, Product and Society, Women in Product Boston, the Cancer Sidekick Foundation, Team Curious, and Unite for Sight Southeast.
At Harvard, Kathy has held multiple faculty, fellowship, and affiliate positions. At the Kennedy School, she created and teaches Product Management and Society, and launched Product and Society. At the Business School, she teaches Product Management: Building New Technologies. Kathy is an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center where she co-founded the Ethical Tech working group, and focuses on ethics in technology, with an emphasis on engineering culture and computer science curricula. She is also a Fellow at the Shorenstein Center, former Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center, faculty affiliate at the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS), and faculty affiliate with Assembly:Disinformation. As a 2018 fellow of the MIT Media Lab and Harvard Assembly, Kathy co-founded ai-in-the-loop focused on community inclusion in the development of Artificial Intelligence. In 2019, she gave the Commencement Speech at the Harvard University Extension school, and in 2020, the Commencement Class Day Farewell Lecture at the Harvard Kennedy School.
At Mozilla, Kathy co-founded and advises the Responsible Computer Science Challenge and in March 2020, co-founded the new Mozilla Builders Fix-the-Internet Incubator, supporting and funding teams and start-ups with promising ideas for a better internet for communities around the world.
Kathy serves and has served on the advisory boards and councils of technology companies, the Anita Borg Institute, World Economic Forum's Tech Ethics working group, FWD50, Startups and Society, and the “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck” initiative. She has been involved in leadership with ProductTank and Women in Product. She advises tech companies, startups, conferences, and non-profits on product, social responsibility, hiring, building teams, and community inclusion.
Kathy has been recognized as First Lady Michelle Obama’s Guest to the State of the Union Address, Inductee into the Computing Hall of Fame at Georgia Tech, a finalist in the StarCraft II After Hours Gaming League, Lighthouse3's 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics, and worldwide champion at the Imagine Cup Technology Competition. Her work has been featured in Fast Company, Wired, Politico, TechCrunch, NPR, VentureBeat, Nguoi Viet, the Huffington Post, and more.
Kathy completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, Georgia) and Supelec in (Metz, France). Kathy can also be found looking for surf spots along the New England coast, experimenting with recipes that coordinate with F1 grand prix locations, and coaching grade school soccer.
