Workshop Program

Speaker: Leslie K. Lambert, Vice President & Chief Information Security Officer, Juniper Networks

Leslie Lambert is Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Juniper Networks, a leading security vendor serving thousands of enterprise customers worldwide. Ms. Lambert is responsible for overall IT Security Management, including intrusion detection, threat vulnerability assessments, incident management, security awareness, prevention and protection against SPAM and malware attacks, policies/standards/procedures development, and deployment. Ms. Lambert has 30 years of experience in Information Technology and technical/business infrastructure.

Prior to joining Juniper Networks, Ms. Lambert was with Sun Microsystems, Inc., and held several critical IT roles: Chief Information Security Officer, Vice President of IT Strategy and Architecture, Vice President of Service Management and Systems Engineering Practices, Vice President of Demand Creation Systems IT, as well as Vice President of both the iPlanet and Software Systems Group divisions. Ms. Lambert holds an MBA with an emphasis in Finance and Marketing, as well as an MA and BA in Experimental Psychology. She also has degrees in Mathematics and Engineering Technology, and has completed graduate-level study in Computer Science.

Speaker: Emily Gladstone Cole,  Operations Architect, Cisco Systems, Inc.

Emily Gladstone Cole is currently lead Operations Architect for Cloud Security Applications and Email Security back-end functionality at Cisco. Her work includes hardware lifecycle and datacenter management, automated configuration management, and storage administration, as well as mentoring and coaching junior sysadmins. Emily has spent time performing critical organizational roles as system administrator, tech support, security expert, operations specialist, and project lead. Emily specializes in UNIX security and is a co-author of a book on Solaris security for the SANS Institute. She currently holds GSEC, GCFW, and ITIL certifications and is a Certified Scrum Master.

Speaker: Clea Zolotow, Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM

Clea Zolotow is a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM Global Services with over 20 years experience working in the mainframe and midrange environments. Among other initiatives, she's currently working in the Transition and Transformation Specialty Service Area instituting the T&T assets to transitions world-wide. She has just applied for a two-year transfer to Ireland to support this initiative! 

She still works on the Enterprise Computing Model (ECM, an IBM initiative to virtualize 25 percent of our own distributed IT infrastructure onto System z mainframes) as well as client-facing technology advancement, optimization, and strategy. She has patents from automated z/OS installation to mathematical modeling for mass virtualized LPAR migrations. She currently resides in Golden, Colorado, with her husband and two dogs.

Panelists include:
Jennifer Ash-Poole, AdNet Systems/NASA GSFC
Jessica McKellar, Project Lead, Ksplice Group, Oracle
Sherry Moore, Software Engineer, Google
Margo Seltzer, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Jennifer Ash-Poole ran 9-track tapes through a VAX to do translation of Voyager data while in college. After graduating with a BS in Astronomy and Physics, that experience led her to be the planetary expert in a data center request office at Goddard. After a few years, she needed some challenges, so she participated in a circle mentoring program through her company to find out what other opportunities were out there. Through the program, she switched to serving as systems administrator in the same division at Goddard. Now she is a principal systems administrator that works primarily on Web servers and the virtual machine environment.

Jessica McKellar is a kernel engineer from Cambridge, MA. She is a Python Software Foundation board member and an organizer for the largest Python user group in the world. With that group she runs the Boston Python Workshops for women and their friends, an introductory programming pipeline that has brought hundreds of women into the local Python community and is being replicated in cities across the US. Jessica is a veteran open source contributor and a maintainer for several open source projects.

Sherry Moore is a senior member of the Google Fiber team, unleashing the potential of ultra high-speed fiber to transform the Internet. Prior to Google, she spent 14 years at Sun Microsystems doing high-powered software engineering. She honed her computer skills during her extensive development work on firmware and the Solaris kernel for both SPARC and x86 architectures, and on platforms ranging from laptop computers to multi-million dollar enterprise servers. She has worked as a team member doing bring-up of new hardware platforms, as a team lead in the design and development of new kernel services, and is now bringing her unique talents and skillset to networking.

Margo I. Seltzer is a Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Her research interests include provenance, file systems, databases, transaction processing systems, and medical data mining. She is the author of several widely used software packages. Dr. Seltzer was a founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB, and is now an Architect at Oracle Corporation. She is currently the Vice-President of the USENIX Association and a member of the Computing Research Association's Computing Community Consortium.

Moderator Rikki Endsley started her career in IT as the Managing Editor of Sys Admin magazine. She moved on to become Managing Editor and then Associate Publisher of Linux Pro Magazine and ADMIN magazine. In addition to her role as the Community Manager for USENIX, Rikki is the Editor of Ubuntu User magazine and contributes to NetworkWorld.com and Linux.com. In 2007, Rikki received a Master's of Science degree in Journalism from the University of Kansas. For her thesis, she researched how to highlight women's contributions to open source technologies.

In this workshop, we will assess the day and declare an intent to concretely change the shape of computing to make it more supportive of women who desire a career in a computing profession. How can we support the up-and-comers, change the landscape to reduce or remove barriers to women, and engage the other gender to aid in improving the culture?

Cat Allman has been involved with the free and open source software community since the mid-1980s, including stints at Mt Xinu, Sendmail, Inc., and the USENIX Association. Along with speaking at conferences including LinuxTag, SCALE, OSCON, SELF, SIGCSE, LCA, and the Ohio Linux Fest, she co-chaired the 1st Open Source Track at the 2010 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and moderated a panel there.

Speaker: Sabrina Farmer, Site Reliabiity Engineer, Google Inc.

Sabrina Farmer is an engineering manager at Google responsible for Gmail. In this role she leads the development and operations of Gmail’s production software infrastructure, network configurations, and the user experience. She has worked in both the private and public sectors at companies in California ranging in size from large, through medium, to startup, including NASA, WebMD, Excite@Home, and Netsuite. She earned her BS in Computer Science from University of New Orleans (UNO) and lives in Silicon Valley with her husband and two young children.

She has been a strong advocate for women in engineering and currently leads a Diversity effort for Site Reliability Engineering at Google. She founded the Scholarship for Women in Computer Science at UNO in 1996 as a way to give back and encourage women to work through their fears of what might happen and instead focus on their ability to bring their talents to an industry that will only be successful with diverse points of view and perspectives.