Outstanding Female Engineer, Megan Smith
Megan Smith, an award-winning entrepreneur, engineer, and tech evangelist took the Outstanding Female Engineer honors.
Megan received her Bachelor’s and Master’s in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After graduating she worked at a variety of start-ups, including Apple in Tokyo and General Magic, before becoming the CEO of PlanetOut, a leading LGBT online community. Megan joined Google in 2003 and served as the VP of New Business Development, where she managed early-stage partnerships, pilot explorations, and technology licensing across Google’s global engineering and product teams. She then transitioned to Vice President of Google[x], Google’s advanced products team, and led a wide range of diversity and inclusion initiatives including co-creating Women Techmakers.
In September 2014, President Obama named Megan Smith the United States Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. In this role, she served as an Assistant to the President and focused on how technology policy and innovation can advance the future of our nation.
After leaving the White House in 2017, she helped launch the Tech Jobs Tour, which aims to promote diversity in the technological sector. As of March 2018, she is the CEO and Founder of shift7, a company specializing in tech-forward innovation and inclusive collaboration for faster, scaled impact on economic uplift, equity and inclusion.
She has served on the boards of MIT, MIT Media Lab, MIT Technology Review, and Vital Voices; as a member of the USAID Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid; and as an advisor to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and the Malala Fund, which she co-founded.