Keynote Women Speakers

Expertise: STEM

Engineer by nurture, feminist by nature; Her first award-winning keynote, aged 20, was titled “Am I Being Too Ambitious?”, referring to comments she received for studying engineering. Her decades of keynote and panel moderation experience range from Cloud Asia and TechXLR8 to teaching Cloud and AI at the Singapore Council of Women’s Organisation’s ITHub.  She was born in Sri Lanka, grew up in Australia, and now resides in Singapore. Shehara’s relentless passion for innovation enabled the design of game-changing digital experiences. She has taken leadership roles at SingTel, Telstra, and Cisco, in Cloud Computing, Security, and Software. She was the Head of International Cloud Portfolio at Telstra, helping the company create award-winning differentiation in Asia Pacific’s highly competitive cloud market, resulting in 6 industry awards.  Shehara recently served as Vice-Chair of the Asia Cloud Computing Association and is now a Lead Advisor for Cisco APJC.   
Dr. Lakshmi Ramachandran, PhD in Cell & Molecular Biology (USA) has over two decades of experience in diverse areas of science such as academic and pharma research, communications and research programme management. She is an advocate of STEM and actively promotes people in science as the ambassador of the global stories in science initiative and as a co-lead organizer of the Gender Summit Asia Pacific, 2019 Singapore (GS16). Her uniqueness lies in her versatility. She is a writer, speaker, model, role model, poet, and mother of two young boys. She shares her personal experiences within and outside of science through her blog Assorted Life Flavours on lakshmiramachandran.com. She has co-authored a unique memoir-cookbook called ‘Roomies/Foodies’, a witty and informative survival guide for Indian students going abroad. Born in India, brought up in India and the Middle East, educated in the US, and living in Singapore for the last 7 years, she is a global citizen, passionate about a better, peaceful and equal world.