Rising Women of Influence

Amber Huffman is a distinguished Fellow and Chief Technologist for Datacenter IP in the Silicon Engineering Group at Intel Corporation. She currently leads the definition of industry leading IP building blocks for Intel’s Datacenter products (which are responsible for $25B of Intel’s yearly revenue). She is a respected authority on storage, memory and IO architecture, and led Intel and the storage industry toward the definition and adoption of fast, streamlined, highly power-managed and low-latency storage interfaces. She defined, created and drove the NVMe storage standard. This included forming and chairing the NVM Express (NVMe) Workgroup, a consortium of companies that defined a standardized interface for PCI Express-based solid-state drives. She continues to chair the board of directors for the NVMe Workgroup and the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) Workgroup.

Huffman joined Intel in 1998 and previously led the development of the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI), which remains the standard programming interface for SATA today. Subsequently, she led the technical and industry development of ONFI, which standardizes the NAND Flash memory component interface and enables customers to use Flash from various hardware vendors. She has been granted more than 20 patents in storage architecture. Huffman earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Marta Karczewicz received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. (with honors) degrees from the Tampere University of Technology, Finland, in 1994 and 1997, respectively. From 1996 to 2006, she was with Nokia where she managed the “Visual Technologies” Competence Area, and in 2004 she became the head of the Nokia Research Center in Dallas, Texas. In 2006 she joined Qualcomm, where she is currently a Vice President, Technology, in the Multimedia R&D group. Since 1998, she has been active participant in H.264/AVC, HEVC and VVC video codecs development within MPEG and ITU-T standardization forums. While in Qualcomm she has also contributed to projects related to software and hardware video encoder implementation, virtual reality, and Universal Bandwidth compression.

Dr. Karczewicz holds over 300 granted US and over 100 granted European patents on video compression. She was one of three recipients of the Qualcomm IP excellence Award 2012, a prize recognizing the company’s most distinguished inventors. This year, Dr. Karczewicz was nominated as one of three finalists for the 2019 European Inventor Award in the prestigious “Lifetime Achievement” category thanks to her decades-long work on video compression technologies. She is an author of 16 journal papers and over 40 conference papers including 5 invited papers to special issues of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology on AVC, HEVC and VVC, and she received EURASIP’s best paper award in the Image Communication category in 1997.

Suzanne Plummer is a corporate vice president of Design Engineering at AMD. In this role, she is responsible for the design of AMD discrete GPU products, including the newest Radeon products based on the RDNA Architecture. She leads a team of over 800 full-time engineers and contractors in China, Canada and the United States.

Since joining AMD in 2002, Plummer has led several design teams behind AMD’s most innovative technologies, including the low power x86 microprocessor used in the world’s first APU and the x86 microprocessor powering all of AMD’s game console wins. Plummer also directed the teams that designed the Zen and Zen 2 architectures – which power AMD’s new microprocessors and drove the company’s re-entry into the high-performance x86 market.

In addition to her work in x86 processor development, she was the Engineering Lead and interface for all products developed for Microsoft in the Semi-custom business unit.

Previously, Plummer worked in performance modelling and design engineering at Alchemy Semiconductor, a MIPS-based processor start-up company acquired by AMD in 2002, where she helped develop the AU1000 MIPS microprocessor.

Plummer started her career in applications engineering at Motorola Semiconductor before transitioning to design engineering, where she held various roles across architecture, performance modeling, RTL design and design management.

Plummer was the lead for the AMD Austin site for two years and is the Executive Sponsor for the AMD Pride organization, supporting AMD’s LGBTQ community. She has been involved in the AMD Women’s Forum and with AMD’s Learning and Development Organization, helping to design and lead technical leadership training classes.

Plummer has a BSEE from Rice University and has worked in the semiconductor industry for 30 years.

Linda Somerville is corporate vice president of Technology Development – Mask and Materials Characterization at Micron Technology.

Dr. Somerville joined Micron in 1995 and has held a variety of increasingly responsible positions. In her current role, she leads a large global team within the Technology Development department. Her responsibilities include photomask technology development and fabrication, materials characterization, business operations, environmental health and safety, university outreach, and data security. This work supports process technology development for Micron’s DRAM, NAND and emerging memory devices. Prior to joining Micron, Dr. Somerville worked at IBM.

Dr. Somerville earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Utah State University and a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from Northeastern University in Boston. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. Dr. Somerville also serves on the Micron Foundation Board and the Boise State University College of Engineering Industrial Advisory Board.

Vanitha Kumar is a Vice President of Software Engineering at Qualcomm Technologies Incorporated. Vanitha holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University, and a Bachelor of Electronics & Communication Engineering degree from PSG College of Technology, India. Vanitha has 20 years of experience in the wireless telecommunications industry and in embedded software architecture, design, and development. She has also contributed actively to cellular technology standards. In her current role, Vanitha leads the modem SW air interface technology including 5G, 4G-LTE, and Cellular IoT across multiple global locations. She also has vast experience leading multiple generations of Qualcomm chipsets and working closely with customers, vendors and cellular carriers to enable the launch of many devices. She has about 132 granted patents in the US & abroad.

Vanitha is passionate about the role of women in science and technology. She is on the board of Qualcomm Foundation in charge of Corporate Giving. She is also on the board of Elementary Institute of Science which is a non-profit organization that focuses on developing exposure and interest in STEM careers among young children. Vanitha also coaches science Olympiad, Math and Robotics teams at her daughter’s school.

Ching-Wen Cho, Account Director, is responsible for driving multi-billion dollar business in TSMC revenue and enabling strong customer revenue growth (and as a consequence TSMC’s) across a broad range of IDM, Fabless and Emerging Account engagements. Her key roles include setting business strategy and leading operational plan execution to maximize both customer satisfaction and TSMC revenue. She actively leads one of TSMC’s largest customer engagements. Ching-Wen is a rising star and is on track to be a VP.

Ching-Wen’s career has spanned more than 23 years at TSMC. Starting as one of the first female process engineers in TSMC’s fabs, her technical capabilities and leadership qualities were recognized early on and she quickly rose from Module Engineering to a preeminent position as Integration Engineering manager. In that role, she led a group of engineers working on leading edge non-volatile memory processes.

As an Integration Engineering manager, Ching-Wen took the opportunity to work directly with customers and inserted herself in solving their problems. She received very strong positive customer feedback on these interactions. Having experienced this unique demonstration of problem-solving skills, Ching-Wen was heavily recruited by the business teams. Her technical abilities and a can-do attitude have had her quickly moving up management ranks within the business teams. Under her leadership, her team has delivered almost 9X organic revenue growth to TSMC. Ching-Wen is a recipient of the Dr. Morris Chang TSMC Innovation and Customer Partnership Award for delivering strong business results. This award is distinguished, coveted and very hard to come by.

Ching-Wen earned BS and MS degrees in Materials Science and Engineering from one of Taiwan’s Top Universities, Cheng-Kung University. From an early age, she has been driven to achieve as demonstrated by attendance at Taichung’s Girls Senior High School, where attendance is gated by a highly competitive entrance examination.

She has had a distinguished technical career and her work has been recognized through technical paper presentations at Global Conferences. She has been awarded 10 US patents.

Christine Dunbar is the Vice President of the RF Business Unit at GLOBALFOUNDRIES, where she leads an organization responsible for growing and supporting a global business focused on servicing RF (Radio Frequency) needs for next generation of consumer and enterprise communications. Christine received her Bachelor’s Degree in Materials Science & Engineering from Cornell University in 1996.

Christine joined GLOBALFOUNDRIES in July 2015, when the IBM Microelectronics Division was acquired by GLOBALFOUNDRIES. Christine joined IBM Microelectronics in 1996 in Essex Junction, VT.

She has held various technical engineering, management and executive positions throughout her career spanning across many organizations – including leadership roles in Semiconductor Manufacturing Operations, Quality, & Characterization. In 2007, she was appointed Director of IBM Photomask Technology & Operations and served as executive sponsor of IBM’s Joint Photomask Development Alliance with Toppan Printing of Japan. From 2012 until the GLOBALFOUNDRIES acquisition, Christine was the Director of the IBM Specialty Foundry Business Unit.

Christine is also active in her community and in causes important to her. She is a founding member of the Leadership Now Project, a group of business leaders committed to supporting change leadership in US Government. Christine also serves on the Board of Directors at the Boys and Girls Club of Burlington, Vermont and at Wake Robin, a non-profit Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC), in Shelburne, Vermont She lives in Shelburne, Vermont USA with her 2 middle school aged children.

Congratulations to Sandra Rivera for being named Chief People Officer and Executive VP: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190611005761/en

Sandra L. Rivera is senior vice president and general manager of the network platforms group at Intel Corporation. She is responsible for the Intel business group charged with providing innovative technology and solutions to the networking industry. She is also Intel’s 5G executive sponsor and is responsible for guiding Intel’s strategy, commitments, and deliverables for 5G.

Rivera leads a global organization of over 2500 employees to drive the transformation of network infrastructure to Intel-based solutions. This is one of the Data Center Group’s fastest-growing businesses, enabling Intel to become a market leader for network logic silicon, an annual $20B market segment.

Rivera joined Intel in 2000 as a marketing director after the acquisition of Dialogic Corporation. Before joining Intel, Rivera co-founded and served as president of The CTI Authority, and served as president of the computer telephony division at Catalyst Telecom.
Rivera holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Pennsylvania State University. She sits on the governing board of the Linux Foundation Networking project and is a member of the Intel Hispanic Leadership Council.