Gabriela Tavares

Software Engineer, Search 

Gabriela Tavares was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she studied computer engineering at the Pontifical Catholic University. She then received a master’s degree in Logic and Artificial Intelligence from Imperial College London. Her research in AI sparked an interest in computational neuroscience, which led her to Caltech to pursue a PhD in Computation and Neural Systems and study the computational aspects of human decision making.

Gabriela now lives in New York City with her husband Juri, where she drinks too much coffee and works as a software engineer in Google Search. In her spare time she likes going to karaoke, running, dancing, and hiking. This past summer she spent 3 weeks hiking the 211 miles of the John Muir Trail in California.

Papa Kojo Ampim-Darko

Software Engineer, Google for Education

 Papa Kojo Ampim-Darko works on the Google Classroom team. He was born and raised in Accra, Ghana before moving to the US in 2015 to study Computer Science at Grinnell College. He joined Google in September 2019 via the Engineering Residency Program and worked on the Geo Assistant Driving team for a few months before landing his current role.

He has always been very passionate about increasing accessibility in tech as well as incorporating technology into education journeys and he's glad these are the sorts of problems he works on at Google. Outside of work, he enjoys listening to music (his favorite artist is Kanye West), playing soccer (Viva Ronaldo!) and video games (love the God of War series), and reading (mostly sci-fi, he's reading Brave New World now). 

Erin Teague 

Director, YouTube Sports

Erin Teague leads the Sports, À la Carte, and Racial Justice product teams at YouTube. In this role, she is responsible for building best-in-class live and on-demand sports experiences, enabling the purchase and consumption of leading SVOD services, and ensuring that YouTube's products support racial equity.

Prior to Sports, Erin led YouTube’s Virtual and Augmented Reality product team where she built and launched the #1 rated YouTube VR app. Before YouTube, Erin was the Director of Product for Yahoo’s Fantasy Sports and a Product Manager at Twitter. Erin began her career as a software engineer at Morgan Stanley in the firm's Algorithmic Trading Technology group. Originally from Michigan, Erin holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, and BSE degrees in Computer Science and Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan.

Shameeka Emanuel (Moderator) 

Diversity STEM Strategist, Code Next

Shameeka Emanuel is currently a Diversity STEM Strategist at Google tasked with reconsidering the relationship between industry and education to expand capacity in computing education. She is focused primarily on Google's Code Next program. Prior to joining Google, Shameeka was a Senior Product Manager for the Amazon Future Engineer team launching products aimed to increase exposure to Computer Science education in the K-12 space while promoting Diversity and Inclusion in tech.

Prior to joining Amazon, Shameeka worked at Intel Corporation where she held a variety of positions. During that time, she worked to validate four processors in the Xeon Server Family in various capacities (pre-silicon and post-silicon). Her last role at Intel was Diversity Scholar Program Manager. She also served as Co-Chair for the Birds of a Feather committee for the 2019 & 2021 ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conferences.