Celebrating Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. To celebrate, we’ve gathered leaders, founders, inventors, and path-makers from the Technology, Accounting & Finance, and Engineering sectors.

Technology

Jing Li, Innovation & Growth Strategy Lead, Accenture’s North America Technology Business

Beginning her career with Accenture in 2013, Jing Li now leads Cloud transformation programs with clients across industries. From evolving customer channels and developing new collaboration interfaces to infusing new modern architectures and automation, Jing works closely with clients to evaluate how technology can grow their business.

Jerry Yang, Co-Founder of Yahoo!

After realizing how difficult navigating the internet was, Jerry Yang and David Filo created a directory of websites, the early stages of what’s now known as Yahoo! One of the first of its kind, it was a near-instant success. Yang left Yahoo! and is now an angel investor for data-related start-ups such as Evernote and Wattpad, space travel, and longevity research. He also serves on the boards of Alibaba Group, Lenovo, Workday, Inc, and the Stanford University Board of Trustees.

Accounting and Finance

Andrea Jung, President and Chief Executive Officer, Grameen America

Former CEO and Chairman of Avon, Andrea Jung has made her career about helping women. During her leadership, the Avon Foundation for Women raised almost $1 billion, making it the largest women-focused corporate philanthropy worldwide. At Grameen America, she focuses her attention on offering micro-loans to help women in poverty build small businesses as a way toward financial stability.

Ajay Banga, Chairman, Mastercard

Co-founder of The Cyber Readiness Institute, which develops free resources for small to mid-sized businesses to improve their cyber readiness, Ajay Banga is committed to helping people. As Chairman, he recently announced that Mastercard would send help to India and its booming COVID-19 spike through field hospitals, oxygen generators, and money to aid in the release of medications and vaccines.

Engineering

Upekesha Addagatla Ngugi, Flight Controls Design Engineer, The Boeing Company

Seeing the X-38 vehicle at the NASA Space Center in Houston, TX was what made Upekesha Addagatla Ngugi decide to pursue a career in Aerospace Engineering. Now, she creates 3D designs of airplane parts with the help of computer engineering. She’s worked with engineering groups, airline customers in her career, and, as the only Indian woman in the room more often than not, she’s learned to network with people of all cultural backgrounds through special interests. She’s also volunteered with SWE, Society of Women Engineers and as a mentor for K-12 and secondary school students to close the gender and cultural gaps in STEM.

Amar Bose, Founder, Chairman and Technical Director of Bose Corporation

After getting his Bachelor, Master and Doctoral degrees at MIT, Bose joined the faculty where his research led to new patented technologies. It was those patents that were the start of Bose Corporation, where noise-canceling headphone and speaker systems were, and still are, created. He worked with the Armed Forces and NASA and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2008.

Want to know more about Asian Pacific American Heritage Month? Learn more here.

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