2024 Women in Leadership Awards
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Sponsored by the Office of Equity and the History Department
12:30 - 1:30 p.m. | Online at missioncollege.edu/wlcw
Mission College’s Women in Leadership celebration recognizes women, including women of color, who have had a profound impact on the world and/or in their fields.
Award recipients were selected because their leadership provides a positive influence in their communities and their commitment to making a difference in the world makes them an important example to others -- clearly demonstrating the importance of women in leadership positions.
Award Recipients
Susan Jin Davis
Susan Jin Davis has 30 years of experience in the telecommunications, media, entertainment, and technology industries. She currently serves as Social Impact Officer for Al Roker Entertainment, a leading producer of TV, digital, branded programming and entertainment. She is also an advisor for ALO Advisors, a consulting firm specializing in areas of sustainability, diversity, and corporate social responsibility.
Most recently, Ms. Jin Davis was a senior executive at Comcast Corporation, where she held a multitude of roles over a 15-year career at the Company, including becoming the company’s first Chief Sustainability Officer, creating the framework for the company’s Environmental, Social, and Governance disclosures, operationalizing its renewable energy and energy efficiency strategy, and contributing to transforming its fleet to low-carbon vehicles. She also has deep experience in the areas of cyber security, privacy, and online safety and security.
She led the launch of Comcast’s Internet Essentials Program, which offers affordable high-speed internet for low-income households. Now in its tenth year, Internet Essentials is Comcast’s largest, most successful community investment initiative, which has connected more than 10 million low-income Americans to all the opportunities of a digital world through low-cost, high-speed internet at home.
An advocate for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) in business and corporate America, she is active in the AAPI community nationally. She serves as the Chair of the Board of the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies (APAICS) and serves on the Board of the Asian/Pacific Islander American Chamber of Commerce & Entrepreneurship (National ACE). Additionally, Ms. Jin Davis is a past board member of Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics, Inc. (LEAP), the Asian and Pacific American Scholarship Fund (APIA Scholars), and the Juvenile Law Center.
She was recently appointed to the Sustainability Advisory Board of Penn State University’s Smeal School of Business. Her other volunteer leadership service includes the Board of Directors of Chestnut Hill College and the Board of Trustees of her undergraduate alma mater, Bryn Mawr College where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science. She holds a Juris Doctor degree from Penn State University’s Dickinson School of Law.
Valerie Landau
Valerie Landau grew up in the 1960s and 70s, and was immersed in a world of social and political upheaval from a young age. Her formative years were shaped by her progressive education and her parents' journalistic missions to Cuba. After graduating from University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1979, she went to Nicaragua to work on the planning and implementation of the National Literacy Campaign with Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. She then served as Regional Director Northern Managua.
Upon her return to the United States 1981, amid the Contra wars in Central America, she produced the film, Back From Nicaragua, a compelling documentary. In the mid 1980s she was hired by the San Jose, PB.S. TV station as Associate Producer of a Peabody Award–winning series, Silicon Valley. She was immersed in the high-tech world of industry leaders and forged a lifelong bond with computer visionary, Douglas Engelbart. They co-taught courses on Augmenting Human Intellect, presented at international conferences, and co-founded a company together.
Her career took twists and turns, ranging from multimedia design and educational technology to working as a guide and field producer for documentaries. She returned to Cuba frequently working for CB.S.’s 60 Minutes with Harry Reasoner and Lowell Bergman, for German public TV, and with her father, renowned filmmaker and journalist, Saul Landau. Since 1987, she has led over twenty delegations and film crews to Cuba to foster understanding between the American and Cuban people and supports sustainable development projects in Cuba.
After graduating from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, she became an Educational Game Designer, creating several award-winning games. She served as Associate Professor at California State University, Monetary Bay and as Director of Assessment of Educational Effectiveness at Samuel Merritt University. She is the author of dozens of publications on new forms of assessment and educational effectiveness.
She has written dozens of articles and conference presentations and was asked by Smithsonian Magazine to write the article "How Douglas Engelbart Invented the Future." Landau is currently consulting on reimagining education for a generative AI-infused world and on experimenting with 3D immersive worlds as venues for education. She is also still organizing delegations to Cuba, supporting the Cuban people.
Dr. Pippa Malmgren
Tech Entrepreneur, Dr. Pippa Malmgren, is an economist who makes sense of the world economy by writing books, by founding tech businesses, by advising policymakers around the world, and through public speaking and teaching. She lectures at Sandhurst and in the Duke Fuqua Global Executive MB.A. Program. She is a Senior Advisor to The Monaco Foundry, a European start-up incubator for impact-led founders.
She is a member of the Advisory Board at Streamline Media, the firm that built many of the most successful video, digital and VR games in modern history. She has been named a Fellow of The Bertelsmann Stiftung Foundation for 2022-2024. She is also a Founder member of the Lunar University, a NASA-originated project to ensure the first human institution on the moon represents the arts and humanities. She writes a column about the world economy on Substack and is currently pursuing the MIT New Space Economy Program: Technologies, Products, Services, and Business Models.
She served President George W. Bush in the White House as Special Assistant to the President and on The National Economic Council. She served on the President’s Working Group on Corporate Governance and The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets. After 9/11 she was also responsible for assessing Terrorism Risks to the Economy and technology as a source of geopolitical competitiveness.
Before joining the White House, she ran the Bankers Trust Asset Management business in Asia and was then appointed as the Global Chief Currency Strategist. She was then named the Deputy Head of Global Strategy at UB.S.. More recently she advised the British Cabinet on trade issues as a Board Member for The Department for International Trade from 2017-2019. She is a Senior Associate Fellow of RUSI, the world’s leading defense think tank. She has also been involved in the Planning Committee of the B.S.A Huxley Summit.
In 2014, she co-founded a robotics firm that made award-winning industrial drones.She has written several books and her most recent bestseller, The Infinite Leader, won the International Press Award for the Best Book on Leadership for 2021. She has a B.A. from Mount Vernon College and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. from LSE. She completed the Harvard Program on National Security.