Kathy Pham

Kathy Pham is a computer scientist, product leader and entrepreneur who has held leadership in product management, artificial intelligence, software engineering, data science and consulting across the private, non-profit and public sectors. In 2024, she was presented Anitab.org’s highest honor, the ABIE Technical Leadership Award for leading or developing a product, process or innovation that made a notable impact on business or society.

Pham is the vice-president of artificial intelligence at Workday, serves as a senior advisor at Mozilla and is on the faculty at Harvard University where she co-founded the Ethical Tech Working Group. Her work focuses on ethics and social responsibility with an emphasis on engineering culture, responsible and ethical AI, and computer science curricula. Pham is a Shorenstein Center senior fellow and adjunct faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she teaches Product Management and Society. 

In government, she was appointed the inaugural executive director of the National AI Advisory Committee where she led the group that advised the White House on AI; served as the deputy chief technology officer of the Federal Trade Commission where she helped build the first Office of Technology; appointed to a generative AI taskforce at the Department of Defense; and was a founding product and engineering member of the United States Digital Service at the White House. 

Pham’s private sector leadership has spanned Google, IBM and Harris Healthcare. She has served on the advisory boards of Blue Tulip Ventures, the Anita Borg Institute, the Georgia Tech College of Computing, the “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck” initiative, Civic Signals, Startups and Society, FWD50 and numerous Fortune 500 companies.

Pham was the co-founder and co-lead of the Responsible Computer Science Challenge and founder of the Mozilla Builders incubator. She served as a fellow in ethics and governance of artificial intelligence at the MIT Media Lab and Berkman Klein Center, with a focus on artificial intelligence and communities Pham was also a Civic Science Fellow at the Rita Allen Foundation.

A daughter of Vietnamese refugees, in 2021 Pham established an endowment at Georgia Tech for computer science majors with demonstrated financial need. The Mary Hương Thị Phạm Scholarship is awarded annually and honors Pham’s late mother, Mary, and “single parents, and resilient fighters who push for the best for themselves, their families and their societies.”

Pham completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, Georgia) and Supelec (Metz, France).

Kathy Pham is available to advise your organization via virtual and in-person consulting meetings, interactive workshops and customized keynotes through the exclusive representation of Stern Speakers & Advisors, a division of Stern Strategy Group^®.