Celebrating Pinays in STEAM Our International Women's Month/Women's History Month Feature, Filipinos@Riot Games (FAR) at Annual Game Developer Conference (GDC)
Annual Pinays in STEAM International Women's Month/Women's Month Feature, Pinays in STEAM Groups, Pinay Musicians, Pinays in STEAM Authors
Happy International Women’s Month/Women’s History Month!✨
On behalf of FASTER, we’re happy to wish you a March filled with Pinay joy. Over the years (and more than in the month of March), we highlight Pinays leading all throughout our industry. See below for the folks we want you to know about, use their software, hire them, buy from their small businesses, and actively listen to them (not only their music).
💝 I gift a women in tech repository (by no means complete) to my fellow technical Pinays in STEAM, shout-out to all the Pinays that code. Check it out here. 🔗💻
And lastly, as you may know, March is always jam-packed with events (not only celebrating International Women’s Month/Women’s History Month), and the usual convening of leading tech conferences in Silicon Valley, from the annual Nvidia Graphics Programming Unit (GPU) Tech Conference (GTC), Ethereum SF (ETH SF - hosted in UC Berkeley, Stanford, and San Francisco) and Game Developers Conference (GDC) where the entire Bay Area/Silicon Valley is filled with plenty of side events, parties and more. Featured Event: RSVP to Filipinos at Riot Game Developers Conference (GDC) Mixer - details below from FAR Founder Ian Torres (Senior Software Engineer, Riot Games). 🕹️🎮
FASTER Official Announcements
💰Sponsorships
FASTER has been a labor of love and has running for the last 9 years on sponsorships and donations. We seek out sponsors to help achieve our goals to serve at scale. If interested, feel free to reach out to us via email us.
🙋🏻♀️✊🏽 Join FASTER - Become a member of any of our FASTER Components, FASTER Education, FASTER PROS and FASTER FACETS, and FASTER FRESH. See all the links below on how to get involved. Fill out any of these forms in case you haven’t to be approved to our Official Facebook and LinkedIn groups.
🫡FASTER Committees - If you’d like to get involved, apply to join our FASTER Leadership Committees:
📜 FASTER Historian Committee - We’re actively working our podcast. Fill out an application to join the team as we finalize our recording schedule!
🗳️ FASTER Seasonal Feature Nominations - Don’t forget to submit announcements for May - Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month by April 16. We highlight leading Filipinx Americans in our industry from rising stars and seasoned veterans to shine a light on all the amazing contributions and work our members are doing to inspire innovation the industry and society.
🙅🏻♀️ So we sometimes gotta regulate. We’ve updated our FASTER Code of Conduct here to include our social media posting guidelines. We will not tolerate any spam on any of our social media networks, violators will be removed!
👩🏻🏫 Pinays in STEAM You Should Know
Our Pinays in STEAM Community Partners and Allies
Filipinas In Tech Founded by Korina Mercado. Follow @FilipinasinTech
Filipinas in Computing (FilipinasIC) Official Anita Borg Institute Syster Group Founded by Elizabeth Bautista. Follow @FilipinasInComputing
Association of Filipino Scientists of America (AFSA) Founded by Kalay Bertulfo Follow @afsa.official.
Pinays in STEAM - From seasoned veterans to rising leaders
Rising Pinay Leader - Melanie Perkins 👩🏻💼 - Founder and CEO of Canva - In her own words here. Forbes Profile.
Feature: Pinays in AR VR MR XR/Spatial Computing - I’m so grateful that we got some amazing Pinays who have been making waves for years in the industry representing alongside me in this space!
Alesha Unpingco - Niantic Inc., Senior Manager, UX Design
Veronica Flint - Founder and CEO, Quixotical
Pinay Legends
Sheila Marcelo - Founder and CEO of Care.com - Listed as one of the most powerful entrepreneurs by Fortune in 2009.
Feature: Katrina Montinola - 2Go Advisory Group, Lead of the Practical AI Practice
Pinay Trivia Throwbacks -❓We’re proud to have had these amazing Pinays speak at various FASTER events including FASTERCONs over the years.
Who was listed as one of the top engineers in the world by Forbes in 2018?
Anne Aaron, Director of Encoding Technologies at Netflix 📺 - See her listed here in Forbes. Read more here.
Who the bride to be married in Virtual Reality (VR) in the 1990s?
Monika Jo ᯅ - Watch more on YouTube here.
📚 Books by Pinays in STEAM
New releases
Looks Good to Me: Constructive Code Reviews By Adrienne Braganza
The Vale By Abigail Hing-Wen
Throwbacks
Coding in Python for Kids By Adrienne Braganza
Practical Data Science in R By Nina Zumel
11 Seconds to Success by Cyrene Quiamco
Creating Augmented and Virtual Realities: Theory and Practice for Next-Generation Spatial Computing by Erin Pangilinan
The Vibe - What We’re Listening To - The Voice Embodying Pinay Power at its finest - Filipina American/Pinay Music Collectives and Historic Collaborations
🎤 Ruby Ibarra, Rocky Rivera, Klassy, and Faith Santilla - “Us” - Watch Video reaching 1M views. Fun fact: me and Joanne Boston (past founder of Filipinos at General Assembly) make a cameo in black and white.
🐉 Ruby Ibarra, Ouida, Han-Han, and the legendary June Millington - “Bakunawa” - Watch here.
🎸🥁 Pinay Voltron - New Release: “Gulay” on the new album “Everyone’s Busy” - Follow on IG
🎛️ Anything mixed by Ladies of Sound - DJ Collective Ladies of Sound (official women’s division of the Beat Junkies). - Follow on IG
🎶 90s Jams by leading groups with power vocalists
Pinay - “Dahil Sayo” and “Is it Real” - Follow on IG
Honey Love a.k.a. Premiere (Alisha 🤍 Gigi 🤍Leslye) - “Something About You” on YouTube - Follow on IG
One Voice - “When You Think About Me” - Follow on IG
FilAm Community Resources - ICYMI
🫂 - Provided by Dr. Therapinay, FASTER Community Partner and their LA Chapter has a great free resources for those affected by the Los Angeles Fires, which you can view here.
📦 NAFCON has fundraiser links for LA Fires and Typhoon Relief here.
📈 What We’re Re(Reading) - Pancit Visualization by Eric Daza. Yes, we end with pancit. Check it out here on Stats-of-1.
In solidarity,
FASTER Founder and National Board of Directors President
Pinays in STEAM Feature
Katrina Montinola is a visionary technology executive, board member, and AI strategist with over three decades of experience shaping Silicon Valley’s technological landscape. As a Fractional CTO and AI Practice Lead at 2GO Advisory Group, Katrina empowers organizations to harness the transformative power of artificial intelligence, business intelligence, and data-driven decision-making. A proud Filipina American, Katrina has been at the forefront of innovation, leading engineering teams at Oracle, pioneering web-based platforms, and driving AI adoption for businesses of all sizes. Her leadership spans across high-growth startups, Fortune 500 companies, and mission-driven organizations. She serves on advisory boards at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, Strategic Thinking Systems and LiVeritas Biosciences. She is fractional CTO of True Sage, Inc. and EV2X, Inc, both early stage startups with non-technical founders, where she bridges the gap between the founders and their tech teams. Beyond her technical expertise, Katrina is deeply committed to fostering diversity and inclusion in STEAM fields. She actively mentors emerging leaders and advocates for equitable access to technology and education, ensuring that underrepresented communities have a voice in shaping the future of AI and innovation.
Alesha Unpingco, Senior Manager, UX Design, Niantic
Alesha Unpingco is a Senior User Experience Design Manager at Niantic. With a multi-disciplinary background in interaction design, user experience, building, and prototyping, she enjoys using design thinking methodologies, sprints, and workshops to boost ideation, productivity, and inclusion across product teams and organizations.
Throughout her experiences she’s loved bridging innovation with social good; joining up with or recruiting fellow mischief makers to do some really meaningful, unconventional work; and finding ways to democratize access to and creation with emerging and immersive technologies (including AI, spatial computing, augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, and more).
Before Niantic, Alesha spent a couple years in Apple’s Vision Products Group and even built a team of designers, prototypers, and researchers during her time there. Prior to Apple, Alesha worked on a variety of projects at Google related to business/ads, AR/VR, games, and social.
Beyond that, she’s worked with brands like Honda, Acura, and Intuit at a creative agency and did some mission-driven design work with startups, non-profits, and higher ed wearing many hats.
Veronica Flint, Founder and CEO, Quixotical
Veronica Flint is a multi-award-winning XR Creative Director, technologist, and tinkerer in the XR space. Spanning over a decade of working with immersive technologies, her specialization in innovative ways to tell interactive stories has garnered exceptional reception from top festivals and mainstream platforms. Her work has been featured at festivals including Sundance, SXSW, and Tribeca. She's also worked with almost every big giant in XR, including Snap, Google, Microsoft, and Meta. Her expertise in cutting-edge technologies has utilized virtual production, volumetric capture, performance capture, and gaming.
RSVP to the Filipinos at Riot Games Mixer for Game Developers Conference (GDC)
Filipinos At Riot (FAR) is once again hosting our annual Merienda Mixer at GDC this year! Come hang out with Filipinos throughout the game industry and at Riot over lunch.
About FASTER
Established in 2015 by Erin Jerri Malonzo Pañgilinan, FASTER serves a multi-generational movement of Filipinx Americans in Science Technology Engineering Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) and seeks to preserve the historical contributions of our community to the industry and society. We primarily serve Filipinx American professionals working in the STEAM industry located within the tech ecosystem of the United States. Through our various initiatives, we encourage our community to inspire, connect, and innovate. Our FASTER components promote education, professional development, and innovation. We are dedicated to justice, equality, and excellence.