Adena Friedman

President, Nasdaq

Adena T. Friedman currently serves as President of Global Corporate, Information, & Technology Solutions for The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: NDAQ). In this role, Ms. Friedman is responsible for overseeing the strategy and operations as well as having financial responsibility for the company’s Corporate Client Group, Information Services and Technology Solutions business segments.

Bruce Aust

Vice Chairman, Nasdaq

Bruce Aust, Executive Vice President, Global Corporate Client Group, oversees NASDAQ’s new listings and capital market business as well as global business development and relationship management with the 3,300 companies listed on NASDAQ OMX Group’s 16 listing markets.

During Mr. Aust’s tenure, NASDAQ OMX has attracted some of the country’s highest-profile IPOs, including Google, Dunkin Donuts, Carlyle, Splunk, Tesla, and Facebook, as well as NYSE company switches including Mattel, Vodafone, Dreamworks, Texas Instruments, Viacom, Wendy’s and Kraft Foods Group.

Anna Ewing

Executive Vice President, Corporate Solutions @ Nasdaq

Anna Ewing serves as Executive Vice President, Global Technology Solutions for The NASDAQ OMX Group Inc. (NASDAQ: NDAQ), the world’s largest exchange company. Global Technology Solutions was formed in January 2013 as a dedicated software and technology division, underscoring the firm’s long-term strategy to grow a stable portfolio of technology-based businesses.

A widely recognized expert, technology innovator and driver of company and industry growth, Ewing participates and is frequently featured as a speaker at a variety of events globally. She regularly participates in leading financial industry conferences and has represented NASDAQ OMX on government committees including the Financial Research Advisory Committee, which advises the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research. Ewing has won various business leadership and technology strategy awards and was ranked 13th in Institutional Investor’s 2013 Tech 50.

John Devanney

Principal, Moment

John Deavnney is a principal at Moment – a digital product strategy and design consultancy whose goal is to transorm businesses through design. For over 15 years John has been helping design products that are both delightful to use and successful for business.

At Moment John has brought his enthusiasm, design expertise, and leadership to programs for a variety of clients including American Express, The National Football League, ESPN, Tiffany & Co., and Walt Disney. Prior to Moment John led user experience teams in North America and Europe at Sapient, working for clients such as Vodafone, AT&T, and General Motors. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Design from the University of Cincinnati.

Sofia Millares

Creative Director of Product Design, Nasdaq

Sofia Millares is the Creative Director of Product Design at NASDAQ OMX. For the past two years she has been overseeing the styling and global functionality for the entire product suite offering. She is determined to expand the NASDAQ OMX branding throughout all platforms and create new ways to position and rethink these products.

Sofia always had an interest in design. She was born and raised in Mexico and moved to New York City seven years ago to pursue a BA in Design and Management with a concentration in graphic design from Parsons the New School for Design. Before joining NASDAQ, Sofia worked for several design agencies and e-commerce companies as a web and graphic designer.

Monet Spells

UX Designer

Monet Spells is a UX Designer, pursuing a MS in Human-Computer Interaction at Georgia Tech. She is interested in exploring the ways in which technology can be more deeply integrated into our daily lives without disrupting meaningful people-to-people interactions. Monet was a Product Manager at Paperless Post, a design-driven start-up helping people create online and paper stationery that reflects their individual aesthetics.

Monet is a product enthusiast and spends her mental spare time innovating solutions to everyday problems, simplifying clunky interfaces, and brainstorming industry-wide shifts in technology. She graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in computer science.

Brian Putz

Product Designer, Nasdaq

Brian Putz is a Los Angeles based creative technologist, interaction designer, and product designer. His professional works include making things for children and business people. His personal works are playful, engaging, as well as critical of technologies we use in our daily lives.

Saron Yitbarek

Full Stack Ruby on Rails Developer, CodeNewbie

Saron started her tech journey working in startups, doing everything that wasn't technical. Feeling limited by her lack of technical skills, she decided to learn to code, and is now working as a web developer. She most recently built the platform for the NY Tech Meetup, the largest meet up organisation in the world, and created CodeNewbie, a community working to help people learning to code through a discussion forum, a weekly podcast, and weekly twitter chats. You can also hear her on the Ruby Rogues podcast and check out her blog and cartoons here.

Michelle Kirby

Product Designer, Nasdaq

Michelle Kirby is a creative technologist, product designer and internationally showing artist. She holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons the New School of Design and a bachelor in Fine Arts and Architecture with a minor in Interdisciplinary Studies from Miami University. She’s been a proud luchadora at Nasdaq for 2 years.

David Farkas

Sr. UX Designer, EPAM Empathy Lab

David believes in the collaboration of design, development and business. Having had opportunities to define a design practice, he has experience leading teams and organizations in process and approach as both the team lead and a strategist within an organization. Experience alone isn’t enough though. David’s story can help discuss the challenges and opportunities in creating a design-driven organization.

David lives in Philadelphia and can often be found with post-it notes and sharpies in hand when he isn’t homebrewing.

Jason Delia

Product Designer, Nasdaq

Jason has been designing and developing enterprise web applications for over a decade. As a master of the business (MBA '08), he helps find solutions to problems and validate ideas through code. Jason's design tools of choice are HTML, CSS and JS. When not rocking his Prodaq lucha mask, Jason enjoys spending time with his family, whiskey and coffee. Not necessarily in that order.

Francesca Wedemeyer

Product Designer, Nasdaq

Francesca is a product designer at Nasdaq who works with teams to find simple and intuitive visual stories for complex systems. When she’s not at the office she’s volunteering with ScriptEd, a non-profit that teaches low-income high school students how to code.

Sylvia Lee

Product Designer, Nasdaq

Living in the heart of concrete jungle, Sylvia is a designer and researcher who is fascinated in the crossroads of design and technology. She is working as a product designer at NASDAQ, designing and building digital products for designing web and mobile-based products that serve communications, public relations, and investor relations professionals. Outside of work, Sylvia likes to take photos with her Canon 60D and work on side projects. Currently, she is working on paper art.

Kristy Tillman

Design Director, Society of Grownups

Kristy serves as the design director for Society of Grownups, a new venture that is changing the face of financial literacy for the young adult set. There she is dedicated to crafting and inspiring the brand across both the digital and physical experiences.

Kristy believes in a future where design is a ubiquitous tool that aids underserved communities in solving their own socioeconomic problems. As the co-founder of the Detroit Water Project, an initiative that matches donors directly to Detroit residents in need of financial assistance, she has been instrumental in creating a system that circumvents traditional social services and replaces them with a more efficient community-driven model.

Prior to Society of Grownups, Kristy was a designer at IDEO, an award winning global global design firm. There she worked on variety of projects ranging from brand to digital design. She is a 2013 Media Ideation Fellow, and an alumni of Florida A&M University.

Casey Hald

Product Designer, Nasdaq

Casey Hald is a Product Design Lucha and Gif Master at Nasdaq OMX. He has worked in several companies, doing everything from designing race car graphics, installing wheels on cars, to video editing for a small network show. He's been doing web design for about 6 years and loves anything with two wheels and a carbonated engine. He's a greasy blue collar polo under a suit and tie.

Donna Lichaw

Principal, Greatnorthelectric

For over 15 years, Donna Lichaw has helped businesses such as Atlantic Records, Citi, Bloomberg, Seamless, Apartment Therapy, and WNYC to create, launch, and innovate digital products, campaigns, and services. Emphasizing a unique mix of strategic storytelling, design, and development, she drives teams to think big and get measurable results by starting small. In addition to running her consulting practice and blogging at Greatnorthelectric, Donna is on the adjunct faculty at Parsons The New School for Design and NYU in New York City.

Kristie DeLouise

Product Designer, Nasdaq

Kristie DeLouise most recently graduated with her MA degree from The New School for Public Engagement in Media Studies in 2014. She also graduated from The New School's Parsons School of Design with a BFA in Design and Technology and Eugene Lang with a BA in Liberal Arts in 2013. She now works very passionately as a product designer at Nasdaq OMX, employing her learned skills and exploring those new to her in order to solve complex problems in financial and distribution web applications.

Her other passions lie within marine science and scuba diving, the visual arts as well as designing for and contributing to the business of new ventures such as the, soon to be launched, fashion brand Pardase. Kristie is fascinated with the ability of designers to understand and immerse themselves in any industry or company to identify problems and to explore, then implement discovered solutions.

Matt Ventre

Product Designer, Nasdaq

Matt is a product designer at Nasdaq who has assisted in shaping a fledgling team into a powerful voice for design within the organization. Throughout his career, he has employed his uniquely honed approach to prototyping and iterative design to deliver web based software for leading corporations, major universities, and small companies alike. Matt thrives on bringing teams together with engaging collaborative design techniques. Every day he utilizes tools from sketching on paper to raw HTML and CSS to nurture product ideas from inception to reality.

Russ Unger

Director, Experience Design Center of Excellence, 18F|GSA

Russ is co-founder of Chicago Camps, which hosts low-cost, high-value technology events in the Chicago area, and he is also on the Advisory Board for the Department of Web Design and Development at Harrington College of Design. Russ has 2 daughters who both draw better than he does and are currently beginning to surpass his limited abilities in coding.

Megan Grocki

Sr. Product Designer and Research Lead, Nasdaq

Megan leads research efforts on the product design team at Nasdaq. With over 15 years of experience in research, experience design and strategy, she helps the product teams discover the expectations and behaviors of their audiences and identify opportunities for engagement. By being the ultimate user advocate, she is able to illustrate the big picture centered on relationships that unfold over time, while probing on important details of their workflow. Her previous speaking gigs have included UPA International (2010), Interaction11 (2011), Healthcare Experience Design (2012, 2013, and 2014), UXStrat (2013-2014), and IA Summit (2010 and 2014). In addition, she served as IxDA's Interaction12 Dublin conference program director. In her spare time she is earning her master's degree in gastronomy at Boston University.

Andrea Mignolo

Chief Design Officer, SimpleReach

Andrea Mignolo is the Chief Design Officer at SimpleReach, an analytics startup based in New York City. Previously she was the Creative Director at Nabewise, a neighborhood-centric startup that was aquired by Airbnb in 2012. An interaction designer by trade, she is currently obsessed with bringing design-centered practices to enterprise SaaS and building a kick-ass team of full-stack designers. In addition to design, Andrea loves gaming, hiking, beer, and funny hats.

Kim Bieler

UX Manager, FireEye

Kim Bieler manages a team of kick-ass UX designers at FireEye, a leading cybersecurity company, and designed the 1.0 version of FireEye’s innovative endpoint product. Prior to joining FireEye, she ran her own creative consulting firm for 13 years and led a weekly roundtable for small and micro design firms. Kim served as local leader for the DC chapter of the Interaction Design Association from 2010 to 2012 and has presented on design and business topics at IA Summit, UserFocus, EDUI, and RefreshDC. Her focus is on applying design tools and thinking to professional effectiveness—whether that’s designing a resume, managing a team, or using enterprise software.

Dan Weldon

Team Lead, Vitamin T

A Brooklyn born, NJ raised, creative talent veteran for the past 8 years, Dan Weldon leads the NYC based team for Vitamin T - a division of Aquent - and joined just prior to the launch of the brand in April of 2011.

As part of the talent agency for digital creatives, Dan is excited to be a part of Pro / Design to share his knowledge and expertise in hiring trends & challenges - like talent shortage concerns, and provide unique insight into his partnerships with the people & organizations that continuously strive to make our ever-changing digital experiences better everyday.

His favorite non-digital experiences definitely include convincing people that they might have a chance on the pool table…

Joanne Weaver

Founder and President, The Joanne Weaver Group

Joanne Weaver is the founder and president of The Joanne Weaver Group, a UX/UI design recruitment firm in NYC. She opened up shop in the fall of 2007, with the guiding principle that good user-centered design is a kindness to our fellow human beings--it makes life easier and more beautiful. Joanne puts good UX into practice in the very way she recruits: her guiding philosophy is to only work with the best of the best, have laser-like focus, provide a high degree of customization and attention to detail, and most importantly, infuse it all with a sense of shared purpose and humor.

She is an unwavering supporter of people following all their dreams in life, and she walks the walk herself. Music is a long-standing passion in her life, and she regularly sings spacey sci-fi triphop and jazz around New York City. She’s performed at The Flatiron Room, The McKittrick Hotel (home of “Sleep No More”), The Wooly, Toshi’s Living Room, and Theatre 80. She is launching her second full-length album, Interstellar Songbook II, in the winter, and has released three music videos, including "Golden Earrings" which premiered on LA's indie tastemaker site GroundSounds.com. She also enjoys being wacky “Auntie Jojo” to her two nephews in Memphis, exploring the world internationally, throwing “no cellphone parties,” and further adding to her #manicureonacat series, featuring her super fantastic feline Lucy, on Instagram.

Aaron Irizarry

Sr. Product Designer, Nasdaq

Aaron Irizarry is a Sr. Product Designer for Nasdaq OMX, lover of heavy metal, and a master of BBQ arts.

Aside from his work at Nasdaq Aaron has worked with his partner in crime Adam Connor to train organizations such as Google, Cigna, Aetna and others, on improving the quality of their design discussions. Aaron and Adam have a book published by O'Reilly coming out in the beginning of 2015 on the topic of improving the discussion surrounding design.