Nordic Women
in Tech Awards

Judges 2020

We are proud to have a judging committee that consists of highly accomplished individuals whose work have had a real impact on the tech industry. Founders, innovators, CEOs and leaders across fields such as AI, robotics, telecommunications and community outreach to further develop emerging talents who will shape our future.

Please, find bellow more information about each of our 10 judges.

When selecting a winner for each category, judges will consider the following criteria.

  • Social/Community impact
  • Leadership
  • Creativity/Innovation
  • Strategy/Execution
  • Results – quality and quantity to support the success
Portrait of Camilla Ley Valentin

Camilla Ley Valentin

Camilla Ley Valentin has been celebrated as the Female Entrepreneur of the Year in 2012 and in 2015 she was selected as one of the Top 50 European Tech Women. She was quick to accept a role as a judge for Nordic Women in Tech Awards as it’s a cause close to her heart.

“There is a need for role models. And there is a need to keep talking about why we don’t see more women in tech. A diverse work force increases the ability to understand needs and requirements and it’s of great significance that we elevate the change-makers of the Nordics.” CCO and co-founder of Queue-it, Camilla Ley Valentin

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Portrait of Gemma Whitehouse

Gemma Whitehouse

Gemma is a technology and business development CTO consultant with some 15 years experience leading product and service development and delivery. She has worked internationally across a diverse range of industries from New Zealand to the Nordics, however the last few years she has had a focus on emerging technologies, finance and healthcare, and in particular evolving new IoT lead products and disruptive models for business.

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Portrait of Gunnlaugur Jónsson

Gunnlaugur Jónsson

Gunnlaugur Jónsson is the founder and CEO of the Icelandic Fintech Cluster, a society of 90 members, ranging from startups to banks and universities. The Fintech Cluster operates a fintech innovation center in Reykjavik and helps fintechs from Iceland and other hubs connect and develop.

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Portrait of Janus Sandsgaard

Janus Sandsgaard

Janus Sandsgaard is Head of Digital Policy at The Danish Chamber of Commerce – one of the largest professional business organisations in Denmark. Janus has 20+ years of experience with a mix of technology, politics, society and business. Janus is a former civil servant and used to run a small internet company back in the dawn of the World Wide Web. When not talking about technology in his professional life, Janus is co-hosting a podcast about movies and tv-series with technology and its impact on society.

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Liv Bergþórsdóttir

Liv Bergþórsdóttir

Liv Bergþórsdóttir has worked in the telecommunications sector for about 20 years and participated in the establishment of several Icelandic telecommunications companies. She was co-founder and CEO of Nova, a mobile operator in Iceland from its establishment in 2006 until 2018.

Today, Liv is the CEO of the biotechnological company ORF Genetics which is known for using barley grain as a vehicle for recombinant protein production and the successful skincare brand BIOEFFECT.

Liv is the Chairman of the Board of Iceland Seafood International and has served on the boards of numerous companies such as Keahotels, The Blue Lagoon, CCP Games and 66 North.

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Portrait of Mie Hansen

Mie Holmbo Bech Hansen

Mie is a NewTech Management Consultant and Head of Business Analysts in KPMG NewTech, a team working with the implementation of emerging technologies. Her primary role is as project manager and business analysts, bridging the gap between business needs and technical solutions. She has experience with technologies such as Robotic Process Automation, Machine Learning, Conversational AI and Process Mining.
 
Mie is a part of KPMG Denmark’s diversity community that works towards higher diversity across the firm and in related industries.
 
Mie was in 2018 nominated for Women in Tech Rising Star and part of the jury in Women in Tech 2019.
 
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Portrait of Monica Kristoffersen

Monica Kristoffersen

Monica is a part of KPMG NewTech, where she is ensuring a smooth implementation of the solutions that NewTech provides. She is an experienced consultant, and has a solid understanding of new technologies, both from a business as well as a technical perspective. Her work has been focused on implementing and developing RPA solutions for small and large clients. It means that she is capable of identifying and optimizing the most complex processes, as well as automating them. Monica has a master’s degree in IT management and Business Economics from Copenhagen Business School and has studied both at Melbourne Business School in Australia and Otago Business School in New Zealand.

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Portrait Niklas Hall

Niklas Hall

Niklas Hall is the co-founder and CEO of Acumex, a tech company developing AI solutions for negotiations in trading and procurement. He has 20+ years of experience from different industries in both the private and public sphere. He has been a mentor for startups in programs like DTU Science Park’s mentorship program, well known for driving the Danish Tech Challenge, and DTU Stardust, the student driven startup program at DTU, the Technical University of Denmark. He has also been on the evaluation committee for Mikrolegater (micro grants) at the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship for several years, as well as being on the jury for Start Up Programme. He has been on advisory boards for startups in both Sweden and Denmark and is a board member of the non-profit organization Female Founders of the Future. Not forgetting the next generation he has also been a volunteer in the Danish organization Coding Pirates for 4 years, inspiring children to explore the world of tech and coding.
 
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Peggy Poon speaking on stage

Peggy Poon

Peggy, a Woman in Tech herself, worked with solving complex organizational challenges and implementing technical solutions to large multinational corporations for 6 years in different countries before she moved to fully focus on what she call her passion – tech startups. She currently drives Microsoft for Startups in Sweden and is a real enthusiast when it comes to entrepreneurship.

Besides that, she is all about give-back and has been involved in non-profit initiatives, mentoring and spoken for Diversity & Inclusion for the past 10 years.

She is currently running an initiative called Ownemployed, which is a platform that encourages people to choose the entrepreneurship path as a movement against unemployment by COVID-19. It is currently built by over 20 heroes from all around the world and it became one of the winning concepts in the EuVsVirus challenge.

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Portrait of Pooja Sousthanamath

Pooja Sousthanamath

Pooja is the Co-founder and Chairperson of Women in Tech- Gothenburg, which aims at creating a nurturing community for girls & women in the tech scene. She has also co-created an Indian NGO PARIJNYAN to break attitudinal barriers surrounding higher education in Indian society. She is currently working alongside Engineers Without Borders to create a curriculum for school girls in Tanzania. She relentlessly advocates for child education, women empowerment and mental health with a firm belief that these are the cornerstones of overcoming current challenges and forming better leaders for tomorrow.

While she’s passionately serving the society in the evenings and weekends, During the day, she works as a System Engineer for high voltage power conversion components in electric and autonomous vehicles. She has worked both as a developer and test engineer across different continents. The knowledge she has gained through several years of experience  in the automotive industry has enabled her to support organizations develop solutions that contribute to the vision of a more sustainable society.

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Portrait of Sandra Calvo

Sandra Calvo

Sandra has always been a technology geek. After studying electrical engineering in Spain, she decided to write her master thesis in Finland. Worked for a while programming APIs for the automation of electrical network until she realized she needed more human interactions and moved to technical sales at IBM. Since 2015 she focused on IBM’s public cloud portfolio as a Nordic cloud engineer.

Sandra is an energetic technical expert and business needs interpreter with an uncompromising attitude and a professional approach to any application development tool. For day-to-day work, Sandra builds applications for customers using IBM Cloud services like Watson, from chatbots to image recognition to IoT. She also is an IBM Academic Ambassador teaching about Cloud & AI in several universities and passionately involved in motivating younger generations, especially women, into technology.

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