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.

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. Laura is now interested in developing interventions that cultivate these emotions.

Caroline Hollister, BA

Caroline is a marketing and communications professional with a passion for inspiring action and teamwork. She brings hands-on experience working to improve company culture through communication. Caroline has developed and implemented training programs and loves to be mission-aligned in her work.

Kristen M Lee, MA

Kristen is a PhD student in Health Psychology at UCLA where she conducts research at the intersection of social connection, health behaviors, and wellbeing. Her work considers the broader social context as well as social-emotional factors (e.g., sense of belonging) that promote or inhibit positive behavior change.

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.

Rahul Goel

Rahul is a tech lead manager at Google Bard where he is leading modeling efforts at Bard Extensions. Prior to that Rahul was a modeling Lead at Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. Rahul is one of the leading voices in the field of LLMs with expertise in Generative AI and Dialogue systems.

Ravi Subramaniam, PhD

Ravi is a Distinguished Technologist at HP where he leads and develops new concepts for future products and services. His current focus is on Machine Learning for efficient deployment for inference and training at the edge and on PC, IOT and device ecosystems.

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.

René Janssen, MSc

René is Founder and Managing Director of Lepaya, an on-demand learning platform for corporations and individuals. Lepaya is based in Amsterdam, serves clients across Western Europe, and has grown rapidly since inception. Prior to this, he was Deputy Chief People Officer at Lazada, a Rocket Internet-founded business acquired by Alibaba.

Julia Geer, MS

Julia Geer is an executive specialized in commercialization and scaling of leading-edge technologies. She started her career in sales management and has progressed to leading sales, marketing, business strategy and product development in domestic and international markets. She has worked with startups and navigated multiple acquisitions.