The mission behind
AwakeTeams

Laura C. Wells, MBA

Laura has trained leaders in emotional intelligence at organizations including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Kaiser Permanente. She also led Marketing at the nonprofit Brain & Behavior Research Foundation where she learned about neuroplasticity and human potential for behavior change. Prior to that she worked internationally in Fortune 100 CPG companies as a brand manager.

Paul van der Laken, PhD

Paul’s PhD is in People Analytics, with a focus on the application, usage and deployment of statistical and algorithmic techniques in the HR domain. He has been leading and managing innovation and data analytics teams at multinational companies, including Mars and Royal Dutch Shell. Paul also teaches professionals in effective data science deployment.

Nishka Chotai, BS

Nishka is a data and computer engineering graduate of UC Berkeley with a concentration in Cognition. Proficient in Python, Java, SQL, and various data science libraries, her goal is to apply her technical acumen to tackle real-world challenges and make meaningful contributions. Nishka is passionate about using a data-driven approach to build great products that users truly enjoy using.

Laura Isela Hazlett, PhD

Laura has a PhD in Social Psychology from the Social and Affective Neuroscience Lab at UCLA. Her expertise is in understanding how positive social emotions, such as gratitude and social warmth, affect our brains and bodies. She is passionate about using data-driven insights to build tools that help us be happier and more productive through positive behavioral and organizational change.

Beste Ozer Tezcan, MA

Beste’s expertise is in talent development at global organizations, including HR at Google. She is passionate about cultivating people’s potential and supporting their journey to become highly aware, emotionally intelligent, and socially conscious leaders who promote cultures of continuous development in their lives, organizations and society. Beste has a MA in Organizational Learning and Leadership.

Kristen M Lee, PhD

Kristen is a behavioral research scientist and helps ensure the AwakeTeams curriculum is science- and evidence-based. She believes in contextualizing individual behavior and leveraging social environments to promote lasting behavior change. Her research expertise includes health behavior change, habit formation, psychophysiological stress, and social wellbeing.

Rahul Goel, MS

Rahul is a startup technical founder in the field of ML and Generative AI. Prior to this he was a Staff Software Engineer at Google where he led modeling for Gemini (previously Bard) extensions and also natural language understanding (NLU) for Google Assistant. Rahul also worked on Amazon Alexa and is a leading voice in the field of LLMs with expertise in Generative AI and Dialogue systems.

Sarah Ko-yung Lee, MEd

Sarah is a former founder with 19+yrs of experience scaling innovative programs, coaching founding teams globally, and investing in future of work companies. A Fulbright Fellow and former Coach at Stanford GSB, she grew revenue to 8-figures and successfully exited her first company in 5 years. She then went on to help scale a tech-enabled startup from pre-seed through Series B.

Luigi Maria Fierro, MBA

Luigi, Head of People & Culture at Clarity AI and former Head of of HR Strategy and People Analytics at ING, leads the HR strategic agenda globally with focus on developing people as well as advanced analytics solutions. Previously he worked with McKinsey & Co. for 10 years, where, among many other things, he contributed to the development of the Organizational Health Index.

Mads Lillelund, MBA

Mads has 20+ years of C-suite experience in high-tech markets. He has led companies through massive product transformations with a focus on disaggregated, virtualized, and cloud native software solutions and has built high performance teams and led the exits for several firms.