MORE ACTIVE GIRLS IN COMPUTING

MORE ACTIVE GIRLS IN COMPUTING

The Ministry of MAGIC

Ira Pramanick

Founder, President & CEO

Ira Pramanick is a Staff Engineer at Google. Prior to Google, Ira worked for nine years at Sun Microsystems, where she was an architect for Solaris Cluster, and chaired the Cluster Architecture Committee. Ira has also worked at Silicon Graphics and IBM, and been in the faculty of the University of Alabama-Hunstville. She has a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and holds six US patents.

While at Sun, Ira served as a mentor in the Sun SEED mentoring program for several years. She has been the keynote speaker at the NSF-sponsored 2007 “Technology Powered by Women” conference. She has a twenty-something daughter pursuing a career in STEM, and is the founder of the MAGIC program, as well as its CEO and the president of its board of directors.
Seema Shukla

Board Member & Secretary

Seema Shukla is the current secretary of the board of MAGIC. She has been a consultant for Southern Living at Home for the past several years. She served on the PTA Board for both elementary and middle schools. She has also served as treasurer for the Chester Montessori School.

Seema has been an active member of the American Cancer Society in organizing fundraisers and various other activities. She holds a Bachelor's Degree in Botany, and a Master's in Political Science, both from the University of Delhi, India. She has two sons who are in their early twenties.
Jazmine Jung

Board Member

Jazmine Jung completed her undergraduate and graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley. She has always loved science and thrives in an environment where there is constant growth and learning. She has been with Kaiser Permanente for more than twenty-five years now, specializing in the field of Clinical Genetics. With constant advances in technology, genetics is as challenging a field now as it was when she began her career.

Jazmine has three adult children at different places in their lives. As they complete their education and pursue their careers, she hopes they always find joy in learning.
Ritu Kamboj

Board Member

Ritu Kamboj currently works as an engineer at Salesforce. She has previously been a Principal Software Engineer at Oracle Corporation. She has over twenty years of software development experience, with expertise in database performance and high availability.

Ritu has a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics, and a Master's degree in Computer Science, both from India. Her interests include mentoring young kids in yoga, and reading scriptures in all religions. She has two teenage daughters.
Sonu Durgia

Board Member

Sonu Durgia is a Product Management leader at walmart.com, where she leads the Search Algorithms team. Prior to Walmart, she was an entrepreneur, and built an online platform to find and book children's activities. She has a Bachelor's in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, and an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley.

Sonu has a young son and a daughter, and hopes to inspire in both of them a lifelong love for learning, and the confidence to do anything they want. She joined MAGIC in 2014, and is a former Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of MAGIC.
Magreth Mushi

Board Member

Magreth Mushi is the CEO of the Tanzania Education and Research Network (TERNET), and a lecturer at the Open University of Tanzania. She graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University, studying under a Fulbright Scholarship. She has an M.Sc. and a B.Sc. in Computer Science, both from the University of Dar es Salaam.

Magreth started with MAGIC as a mentor in 2013. She is a self-motivated leader, with over fifteen years of experience in management and computer science. She is also a committed lifelong learner, with strong interests in leadership, management, business, human relations, and parenting. She has three daughters, and would like to inspire them to always "Stay hungry, stay foolish".
Ian Gulliver

Board Member & CFO

Ian Gulliver is a software engineering manager at (Google) X. He previously managed Google's Privacy Working Group and MySQL Site Reliability Engineering teams. While an avowed generalist, Ian primarily focuses on productionization of complex systems, both software and hardware.

One of Ian's hobbies is videography, and his involvement in MAGIC began when he volunteered to record final presentations and interviews at a MAGIC graduation ceremony. His longstanding interest and efforts to increase gender diversity in technology, especially software engineering, made working with MAGIC a great fit. He is currently the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of MAGIC.
Pi-Chuan Chang

Board Member

Pi-Chuan Chang is a software engineer at Google, and holds a Ph.D. in computer Science from Stanford University, specializing in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning.

After Stanford, she has worked at three companies of very different sizes, including an education startup. She has led machine learning projects in various product areas, such YouTube video personalization, NLP features in search, semantic parsing for voice actions, and improved sequence models in LinkedIn search.

Currently, Pi-Chuan is the technical lead of the open source software DeepVariant which was released in December 2017. She has volunteered for MAGIC since 2008.
Shami Ahuja

Board Member

Shami Ahuja works as a consultant, managing the Business Agility team at Nisum Corporation. She has previously worked as a Software Architect at FICO, and at many different start-ups, living the Silicon Valley dream. She moved to the Bay Area after completing her Master's in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Arlington.

She is involved in setting up the Corporate Sustainability Program for Nisum, with special focus on diversity and inclusion. Her current program, "Nisumosity", helps bring various volunteering opportunities to the employees at Nisum. Shami has two daughters who are college students, and enjoys cooking different kinds of food.
Ben Lunzer

Board Member

Ben Lunzer is an applications architect at GXS, Inc., in Gaithersburg, MD, following a long career at JP Morgan Chase in technology and operations management. He was previously with Accenture, where he led the global middleware group. His prior work was in bioengineering.

Ben is a founding member of the Securities Industry Middleware Council. He has served on the Advisory Council of the IAFE, and as co-chair of its Technical Committee.

Ben and his wife, Hindi, a psychiatric oncologist, have three daughters. The girls share an interest in computing and mathematics, and, with their parents, the removal of any remnants of a glass, or silicon, ceiling.
Margot Hackett Miller

Advisory Committee Member

Margot Hackett Miller is a software engineer at Oracle Corporation, working on the Solaris operating system. Prior to that, she worked for twenty years at Sun Microsystems, and five years at NCR.

In the past, she has served as a MAGIC mentor for two years, and as the board secretary for three years.
Ritu Khare

Advisory Committee Member

Ritu Khare is a senior data scientist at the department of Data Science and Advanced Analytics at IQVIA. She has served as a mentor for MAGIC since 2009.

Ritu received her postdoctoral training from the National Center of Biotechnology Information at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. She has a Ph.D. in Information Science from Drexel University, and a B.Tech. in Information Technology from the National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, India. She grew up in various places in the state of Madhya Pradesh, India.

In her spare time, Ritu enjoys Bollywood dancing and practicing yoga.

Our Mentors

The Real MAGICians