Please join us to honor immigrant leaders
The event highlights the impact refugee and immigrant women have on our economy and our communities, and it celebrates the achievements of women everywhere. Our speaking program features a conversation with our honorees about their life experiences. International Women’s Day (IWD) has been observed around the world since the early 1900s It is a collective day of global celebration and a call for gender parity.
The International Institute of New England has been celebrating IWD since the early 2000s as a way to showcase immigrant women and their advocates. Past honorees include: Rep. Nikki Tsongas, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, Ambassador Swanee Hunt, Dr. Charlotte Yeh, Colette Phillips, Christina Qi, and U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen.
IINE serves nearly 2,000 refugees, asylees, and immigrants in Boston and Lowell, and Manchester, NH each year.
Fifty percent of IINE program participants are women enrolled in refugee resettlement, job training and placement, English language classes, and legal services.
The women we meet in IINE programs protected their families as they fled war and violence in Somalia, Congo, Iraq, El Salvador, Bhutan, and other countries. Since 2016, more than 150 families served by IINE list a woman as their head-of-household. IINE programs are designed to be responsive to and respectful of the unique lived experiences of women who have faced and fled persecution and distress.
Roxann Cooke
New England and Pennsylvania Managing Director of
Consumer Banking, JP Morgan Chase
Dr. Aoife Brennan is an experienced physician, scientist and drug developer responsible for the successful clinical development and registration of multiple transformative medicines. She has served as Synlogic’s president and chief executive officer since May 2018. She joined Synlogic in September 2016 as chief medical officer. Prior to Synlogic, Aoife spent six years at Biogen, most recently as vice president and head of the Rare Disease Innovation Unit, developing programs from pre-clinical to commercial.
A first-generation college graduate, Aoife was born in Kilkenny in the southeast of Ireland, and moved to Boston “for one year only” 16 years ago.
“I have a few formal and informal mentors, but the one who influenced me the most personally is my late grandmother, Ina Smith,” Roxanne said in an interview with the Boston Business Journal. “She was an entrepreneur who owned a grocery store and a seamstress business in Jamaica and taught me some valuable lessons that I remember vividly. She would have customers come in who didn’t have the ability to pay and they would give her an IOU and she would never bat an eye. I learned so much about customer service and managing and building relationships and caring for customers and community. She taught me how to be compassionate.”
Kathrin Knauf
Vice President of Project Management, Moderna
Sandhya S. Douglas leads a global team at Wellington Management which operates at the intersection of all the investment functions and acts as a strategic engine powering a strong, dynamic, and global investment platform. Before joining Wellington Management in 2006, she was a senior vice president at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.
Sandhya was born in Chennai, India, lived there until she was ten years old, and then lived in Singapore until age 18, before coming to college in the U.S. in 1989.
“I’m so driven by my overall curiosity that I tend to ignore my gender identification as it relates to my actions and leadership,” she said in an interview for Women’s Day in 2020. “That doesn’t mean I’m blind to the fact that our industry has more work to do towards equality across gender and other factors… For me, the bigger question is ‘How can we generate interest in areas like manufacturing and show that it is highly creative and heart-based work?’ This way, we can reach a broad range of people overall.”
Kanika Soni
Chief Commercial Officer, Tripadvisor
Julisa Salas, as Chief of Staff, is responsible for driving Toast’s operating system and working alongside the executive team to manage strategic initiatives. Prior to her role as Chief of Staff, Julisa established and led the Go-To-Market Strategy and Operations department at Toast. Julisa was an early employee at Toast, joining in 2016 and serving as Chief of Staff when the company went public in 2021. Before joining Toast, she worked at J.P. Morgan, where she provided financial advice to ultra-high-net-worth individuals. Julisa was recognized by El Mundo’s “Latino 30 under 30” in 2016 and was awarded the Toast Founder’s Award in 2019.
A Dominican-American, Julisa was born and raised in Washington Heights, New York. Her parents emigrated from the Dominican Republic 34 years ago in search of the American dream.
“They left behind the only community they had ever known,” she says, “And everything they had built through years of hard work. If only they had more support or a more structured way to help cope with their new reality and integrate into the community, they could have avoided a lifelong struggle building their identity from scratch again.”
State Street
Tiziana Dearing
2021 International Women’s Day Committee
Committee Co-chairs
Colette Phillips, CEO, CPC Communications
Cathy Schmidt, CEO, McLane Middleton
Committee Members
Paul Ayoub, Partner, Nutter and Chair Emeritus, Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce
Pam Chang, SVP, Welch & Forbes
Michael Douvadjian, Senior Vice President, UBS
Beth Grous, Chief People Officer, Tripadvisor
Avak Kahvejian, Ph.D, General Partner, Flagship Pioneering
Theo Melas-Kyriazi, Executive Partner, Flagship Pioneering
Charlotte McKee, VP, Vertex Pharmaceuticals
Bob Rivers, CEO, Eastern Bank
Raj Sharma, The Sharma Group at Merrill Lynch
Jane Steinmetz, Managing Principal, EY Boston
Kat Tzouganatos, Principal, Deloitte
Promoter Sponsors
