Event Information
Title: "Pushing Boundaries in the ME World."
Moderator: Tracy Hawkins West, ME 1990
Speaker: Caitlin Leksana, Maegan Tucker, Kelly Kloster Hon, Shay Natarajan
Date: Thursday, March 07, 2024
Time: 2:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Location: MRDC 4211 and Virtual
Graduate Student, Staff, and Faculty Social Hour Location: Love Atrium following the event
Please RSVP if you plan to attend.
Join us on Thursday, March 07, 2024, to hear Woodruff School graduates host a panel inspired by Women's History Month as part of the ME Shaping the World Speaker Series.
Meet Our Panel
Caitlin Leksana is the Co-Founder & CEO of Fazeshift, a venture-backed early-stage FinTech startup revolutionizing B2B invoicing and payments. After graduating with her bachelor's and master's degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2017, she worked in management consulting at BCG Atlanta advising Fortune 500 companies on pricing and go-to-market strategy. Caitlin continued on to get her MBA from Harvard Business School, graduating in 2022. After graduating from Harvard, she founded a startup, raised $1M from Venture Capital investors, and currently serves as the Co-Founder & CEO of that startup. While at Georgia Tech, Caitlin taught ME4056 and was also captain of the Georgia Tech Colorguard Team.
Maegan Tucker Maegan Tucker is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech in both the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. She received her BS in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2017, her PhD in ME from Caltech in 2023. After defending her PhD, she also conducted a brief research position with Walt Disney Imagineering R&D in Burbank CA. Maegan's research is centered around achieving dynamic and natural robotic bipedal locomotion using formal methods from both nonlinear control theory and machine learning, with specific applications towards robotic assistive devices. While an undergraduate at Tech, Maegan participated in the GT Oxford and GT-Europe study abroad programs, conducted a co-op with NCR, and was a student researcher in the SURE program. Now that she is back at Tech, she will continue conducting research in her lab and will be teaching ME 6402, ECE 6552 and ECE 4560.
Kelly Kloster Hon (she/her) is a STEMinist working towards a future with gender parity and equality in engineering. Since earning her bachelor’s and master’s in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech, Kelly has been driving critical business outcomes across consumer and medical products. Currently, she is a Sr. Manager, Product Development Engineering at Becton Dickinson (BD), a global medical technology company, where she previously led their Women’s Initiative Network. Today, Kelly serves as a Senator for the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), on Athena’s Board of Directors, and is a member of the Woodruff Young Alumni Council.
Shweta (Shay) Natarajan has had a wide-ranging career spanning engineering, consulting, corporate strategy and finance. Shay started her career as a manufacturing engineer co-op at Honeywell, and as an R&D intern at 3M, while still at Georgia Tech. After graduating from Georgia Tech, Shay worked at Lutron Electronics as a design engineer briefly, before moving to Apple. At Apple, Shay crafted and was responsible for the operational strategy for iPhone displays and accessories. Thereafter, Shay worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company for several years, advising leading global companies on their operational, financial and growth strategy. After McKinsey, Shay joined Caterpillar’s corporate strategy team as the Head of Enterprise Special Projects, where she led a portfolio of strategically critical projects to drive long term growth and reach critical sustainability goals for Caterpillar. After Caterpillar, Shay joined Mobility Impact Partners (MIP), which is a growth-stage private equity firm focused on the automotive space. At MIP, Shay is the Partner of Strategy, and is responsible for identifying the firm’s investment thesis. Her perspectives on mobility have been published in the New York Times, Bloomberg and CNBC.
Outside of work, Shay is part of the Advisory Board, member of the Women of Woodruff, and co-chair of the Young Alumni Council, all at the Woodruff School at Georgia Tech. She also sits on the board of EV.Pro, a fleet electrification company. In addition, she contributes regularly to policy-making bodies in the mobility space and advises several early-stage startups in the AI, fintech and femtech space.
Tracy West worked over 30 years in the energy industry, primarily in the electric utility world. She started her career as a co-op student at Georgia Power. Upon graduation she joined a consulting firm supporting utilities around the world in long term planning. The travel became too much for her family resulting in a transition to Southern Company, one of the largest utilities in the US. Some of her notable roles at Southern included project manager over a $265M environmental control on the back end of a power plant, managing a coal fired power plant here in Georgia and directing a research & development organization looking for technologies to create a sustainable and carbon free future. She added an MBA to her resume and received several awards throughout her career.
Today Tracy sits on our Advisory Board, enjoying retirement with her husband. They have 4 children, 3 grandchildren and 6 grand-pets. You can find her hiking, doing yoga, gardening, in some art class or traveling. She is also a founding member of Women of Woodruff.
Contact Information
For questions, contact Courtney Sykes at courtney.sykes@me.gatech.edu.