Women excel at communication, nurturing a positive atmosphere in the team, problem solving and asking the right questions.

Women around the world are blazing a trail in the data science world, and what better day to honour and appreciate them. There are a lot of women data scientists and leaders out there, who are inspiring both women and men.

The data science community is growing at a fast pace, and data science units are becoming a crucial part of the organisations, across industries. From interpreting large data sets to putting it in use for bringing out business decisions, data scientists are responsible for making data-driven decisions in an organisation.

Let’s take a look at the women data scientists who are doing it all and inspiring us to be a better version of ourselves every single day.

1. Geetha Manjunath:

Dr. Geetha Manjunath is the Founder, CEO, and CTO of NIRAMAI, a deep tech start-up, developing a novel solution for detecting early-stage breast cancer. She has over 25 years of experience in IT research and has led to many innovative projects in Healthcare and Transportation.

She was a Lab Director, heading Data Analytics Research in Xerox India. Before that, she was a Principal Research Scientist at Hewlett Packard Laboratories for 17 years, and a member of the C-DAC team which built the first commercial supercomputer in India.

Dr. Manjunath holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Science and management education from Kellogg’s School of Management, Chicago

2. Amarjeet Kaur of TechMahindra:

Amarjeet Kaur is a research scientist at TechMahindra. She has a PhD in Computer Science and Technology. Kaur specialises in research techniques and technologies like graph-based text analysis, latent semantic analysis and concept maps among others. She also has expertise in experimentation and field research, data collection and analysis, and project management.

Kaur has also worked with the Department of Science and Technology at Women Scientist Scheme. As a part of the scheme, she helped in developing a technique, to automatically evaluate long descriptive answers. Her academic skills and innovative techniques have gained her a gold medal and a topper’s position at Mumbai University. Her innovative skills and course material, has also received a place in Mumbai University’s artificial intelligence and machine learning courses.

3. Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay:

Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay works at the Machine Intelligence Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute. She also completed her PhD from the institute, and became its director, serving for the years 2015 to 2020. Bandyopadhyay, is also a member of the Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council of the Prime Minister of India (PM-STIAC). She specialises in fields like machine learning, bioinformatics, data mining and soft and evolutionary computation.

4. Rwitwika Bhattacharya:

She has been one of the pioneers in tying up Data Science to public governance and facilitating key governmental development programs. Having realized Data Science as her forte, she started a non-profit called the Swaniti Initiative, that offers parliamentarians in varied constituencies, data and insights on taking developmental programs to the masses. She was one of the first women data scientists to think out of the box, and visualize the effects and the change that could be brought in, if data was used by governments in making policy decisions. She is an alumnus of the Harvard Business School.

5. Ashwini Ashokan:

Ashwini Ashokan is the founder of MadStreetDen, an artificial intelligence company that uses image recognising platforms to power retail, education, health, media and more. Starting up in 2014, the venture is headquartered in California, with offices in Chennai, Bangalore, Tokyo, London and more. She co-founded the platform along with her husband.

6. Apurva Madiraju:

Apurva Madiraju is a Vice President at Swiss Re Global Business Solutions India, in Bangalore. She is leading the data analytics and women data scientist, the audit function.

Madiraju, flaunts 11 years of experience across diverse fields like artificial intelligence, data science, machine learning and data engineering. She has developed multiple AI and ML-driven solutions, like ticket volume forecasting models, turn-around-time prediction solutions and more. She has worked across companies globally, to lead the conceptualisation, development and deployment of many AI and ML-based solutions for enterprises.

7. Bindu Narayan:

With more than 20 years of experience as a Data Scientist, Bindu Narayan serves as the Senior Manager with Advanced Analytics and AI at EY GDS Data and Analytics Practice. At EY, Narayan is AI competency leader for EY’s Global Delivery Services. She along with her team, offers virtual assistant solutions to clients across the industry. Moreover, with her skills, Narayan has developed many innovative AI solutions, and leads in the field of machine learning, customer and marketing analytics and predictive modelling. She completed her PhD from IIT Madras, on the topic of modelling Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty.

8. Sarita Digumarti:

If there’s someone who could ask for data to decide between ice cream flavours, it has to be Sarita Digumarti. The co-founder and COO of Jigsaw Academy, Sarita breathes data, and is keen on parting quality education on Analytics to Data Science aspirants. She has over 15 years of experience in the analytics sector, where she has shared her expertise for the growth of companies across sectors like retail, finance, and healthcare in India and the US. She holds an MBA degree in Finance from T.A. Pai Management Institute and a Masters in Arts degree in quantitative economics, from Tufts University.