Meet the PetHack hosts!

Patima Tantiprasut (PetRescue)

Event Host

With almost two decades of experience in the tech industry, Patima has expertise in Design, Digital Strategy, Development & Product Leadership.

Richard Hocking (Google)

Event Co-host

Richard Hocking is a Sales Consultant at Google and has always worked in Tech. Prior to Google he worked at Booking.com in Amsterdam where he learnt to embrace failure through a culture of rapid A/B testing and experimentation. 

Nerissa Penfold (Google)

Big Ideas Session - Facilitator

Nerissa has two decades of experience in sales, marketing, and strategic partnerships in the tech sector, helping businesses grow and evolve through digital transformation. An advocate for ‘adopt don’t shop’ she currently has a dog, Jax, and 2 cats, Astro and Batman Cake. (Top tip: don’t let a 2-year-old name your cat!)

Michael Scutt (Google)

Weekend Hackathon - Co-Facilitator

18 years in the marketing and technology space working across Canada, Europe and Asia Pacific. Mike brings a wealth of experience partnering with businesses of all shapes and sizes to help them drive growth through innovation and strategic consultation. He also adopted Bandi through Pet Rescue the same week he joined Google 5 years ago and is a passionate animal-loving Googler!

Moya Mathias (Google)

Weekend Hackathon - Co-Facilitator

A kiwi who flys - Moya’s worked in marketing and advertising around the world including publishing in NZ, advertising agencies in London and now at Google in Melbourne. The biggest cat lover you’ll find which is useful as she has the biggest cat you can find.

Vickie Davy (PetRescue)

Keynote speaker

Vix has been leading the PetRescue team along with PetRescue co-founder JB since 2004. She’s passionate about bringing the advantages of the for-profit sector to the NFP world, especially in the use of technology to help drive social change, driving innovation to grow capacity, and creating jobs to attract fresh talent to the animal welfare industry and create positive change.

JB (PetRescue)

Keynote speaker

An exceptional leader and innovator JB co-founded PetRescue with a vision to create a safer future for every pet in Australia, and 15 years down the road, his passion for animal welfare and innovative tech solutions has made PetRescue.com.au the most trafficked charity website in the country!

Laura Walker (PetRescue)

Projects & Animal Welfare

Currently overseeing special programs such as The Adoptables, Workplace Foster Care Program, and ad-hoc fundraising campaigns, Laura’s role at PetRescue is to bring people and skills together to smash our animal welfare goals and make things great for pets around Australia.

Laurel Richardson (PetRescue)

Programs & Animal Welfare

A passionate animal welfare advocate, Laurel looks after all the programs that we're able to provide for free to thousands of pet adopters, rescue members and progressive community organisations with the help of our major partners.

Alesha Saliba (PetRescue)

Marketing

Alesha brings a wealth of experience in digital marketing, brand strategy and social media management to connect PetRescue (and the thousands of beautiful pets listed on our platform looking for homes) to the larger community across multiple channels.

Tina Varghese (PetRescue)

Content

Tina uses her words to create positive change for rescue pets. From sharing our initiatives to heart-warming love stories of rescue pets finding their human BFFs, she also keeps our blog updated with all the happenings at PetRescue, and creates external communications for the PetRescue community.

Andy Holland (PetRescue)

Engineering

Andy brings years of experience in software development to #TeamRescue and is keen on using his extensive knowledge in the area to develop customised features that will make PetRescue the best animal welfare platform in Australia!

Tom Leenders (PetRescue)

Engineering

With over 10 years of experience as a developer, Tom’s mission is to help implement new features to help connect thousands of pets with potential adopters, and help take the load off member rescue organisations.

Mel Bishop (PetRescue)

Animal Welfare

Mel is one of the leading SMEs on Breed Specific Legislation in Australia, but has also spent nearly seven years working in animal management. As part of her role as a Customer Service Rep at PetRescue, Mel uses her extensive problem-solving and people management skills to help the hundreds of potential adopters and donors who reach out to us via our helpdesk.

Susan Irwin (PetRescue)

Animal Welfare

Susan brings a treasure trove of animal welfare experience to the team, having worked in pounds, wildlife shelters, catteries and boarding kennels. And as one of the helpdesk superstars at PetRescue, she ensures that everyone who reaches out to PetRescue for help is supported and is one step closer to finding their furry BFF.

Kathy Bates (PetRescue)

Policy Research

Kathy started off as an online relationship support vollie at PetRescue and is now leads all of our policy research.

Maree Daniels (PetRescue)

Community Engagement

With years of experience in fundraising and community engagement, Missy’s role at PetRescue, primarily focuses on supporting us in areas of community engagement, communications, fundraising, and strategizing to ensure that we stay ahead of our Animal Welfare goals!

Kelly Brigham (PetRescue)

Partnerships

Kelly manages corporate partnerships at PetRescue and helps us drive collaborations with fellow pet lovers and animal welfare champions in the community.

Johann du Toit

GDE - Google Cloud Platform

Johann is a globally recognized South African engineer who has worked on everything from embedded microchip readers to leading high traffic news sites with development and design. Actively involved in Launchpad startups mentoring over Africa, helping startups use technologies to delight their customers and find their market fit. Highly experienced with leading departments of teams to successfully launches/operation while always trimming the scope of ideas to a usable, buildable and scalable product. He became the first Google Developer Expert for Cloud in the Africa continent in 2014 and now travels the world with Google to learn from and share his insights with others in the community. Being one of 71 selected individuals over the world selected by Google to represent the company and teach about Google Cloud over the world. Currently working with the financial sector in the Nordics with a big focus on DevOPS enabled enterprises.

Sourabh Choraria (Google)

G Suite / Google Apps Script

Spreadsheet nerd who dabbles in low-code programming using Google Apps Script. I love building automations and improving business workflows/efficiency. Mostly spend my time figuring out how to connect different SaaS tools that offer up an API or any other form of integrations. Currently, I work as a No-Code Builder at dashdash.

Jeffrey Aven (Google Developer Expert)

GDE - Google Cloud Platform

Jeff is a Google Developer Expert (GDE) in the Google Cloud Platform domain.  Jeff is an author of several books and an authorised technical instructor for several different vendors including Google and Confluent.  Jeff specialises in platform, system and application architecture, and can assist with design and modelling, as well as infrastructure deployment and engineering automation.  Additionally, Jeff has an extensive background in data, both operational data and analytics, and can assist with data modelling, processing and consumption patterns (visualisation or ML/inference)

Ganesh Raja (Google Developer Expert)

Customer Engineer

Ganesh is a customer engineer with Google Cloud focused on Data Management, he works with customers to derive the maximum value out of their data using the Google Cloud Platform.  Ganesh has over 20 years of experience in the IT Industry working with both YesSQL and NoSQL databases and analytics platforms and believes that data is the driver for growth and provides the competitive edge that a customer needs.

Yiling Liu (Google)

Creative Technologies

Machine Learning, Data Science & creative thinking.

Lisa Parnis (Redhero)

Founder Redhero

Lisa Parnis is an Ex-Googler and Founder of Redhero a learning technology company. In 2019, she finished in the Top 100 Young Entrepreneurs in Australia and together with her team, won the prestigious pitching competition at MIT's Entrepreneurs Development Program. Lisa loves teaching Google's 10X thinking to help people unlock potential. She is a Melbournian living in Auckland and has a Border Collie named Charlie and 2 Rescue Cats Misty & Harry. 

Anna Emmerson (Google)

Customer Reliability Engineering

Anna Emmerson is a senior Site Reliability Engineering tech lead and manager at Google Sydney with six years experience working across products such as Google Photos and App Engine. Today Anna runs the APAC Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) team, a team who partner with GCP customers to engineer their services for reliability. Outside of work, she loves spending time in nature with her PetRescue pup Leon.

Ned Moorfield (Google)

Product Manager - Google Maps

Co-Founder of GoCatch, Australia's original homegrown taxi and ridesharing platforms, securing over $10M in funding from many of Australia's leading investors. Also previously worked for Eventbrite out of their San Francisco HQs, working on their distribution partnerships with Facebook, YouTube, and Google amongst others. Now working as a Product Manager on Google Maps - Transit. Have extensive experience in marketplace and B2C businesses, payments, transport and logistics

Paulina Szklarska (Google)

Flutter

Paulina is a Flutter GDE and passionate Mobile Developer. Ex-Android Dev, now focused primarily on Flutter. She is actively involved in the IT community, blogging, attending conferences and developing her open source projects.

Paul Trebilcox-Ruiz (Google)

Firebase, Flutter, Android, IoT

Developer Programs Engineer, MBA student, electronics and movie props maker. Former zookeeper.

Emad Ehsan (Google)

Startup, Product Management, Full Stack Dev

Emad is Co-founder, CTO of Traverous and a Google Developer Expert for Pakistan. He's also been a Top Trending GitHub developer and a judge for MIT Solve & World Bank's WURI Challenge. Traverous is his 2nd startup and he has good experience in building and releasing a product fast and iterating with user feedback.

Henry Dobson

Founding Director of the Institute of Technological Ethics

Henry Dobson is the Founding Director of the Institute of Technological Ethics. The Institute encourages technologists and business leaders to think about the broader social impacts and unintended consequences that can arise when building new technology. It also promotes the importance of building technology in a way that enhances society’s collective humanity. Henry is an award-winning technology entrepreneur and is currently pursuing a PhD in the ethics of artificial intelligence. Henry now helps entrepreneurs and corporate organizations with understanding the importance of building ethics into both their business and technology products

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