Kathy Pham is a computer scientist, product leader, and founder who has held roles in product management, software engineering, data science, people operations, and leadership in the private, non-profit, and public sector. During her fellowship at Harvard, she founded the Ethical Tech Working Group, Ethical Tech Collective, and Product and Society.
In 2023, Kathy was appointed as the inaugural Executive Director of the United States National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee. In 2021, she served as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the Federal Trade Commission, with a mission of protecting the public from deceptive or unfair business practices and from unfair methods of competition through law enforcement, advocacy, research, and education.
Kathy’s past work has spanned Google, IBM, Harris Healthcare, and government at the United States Digital Service at the White House, where she was a founding product and engineering member. She has founded Women in Product Boston, the Cancer Sidekick Foundation, Team Curious, and Unite for Sight southeast. Kathy has served on the advisory boards of the Anita Borg Institute (focused on Silicon Valley), the “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck” initiative, Civic Signals, Startups and Society, FWD50, and Fortune 500 companies . She also advises large tech companies, startups, conferences, and non-profits on social responsibility, hiring, building teams, and community inclusion.
At the Harvard Berkman Klein Center, Kathy co-founded the Ethical Tech Working Group and focuses on ethics and social responsibility with an emphasis on engineering culture, artificial intelligence, and computer science curricula. She was also an Assembly Fellow in the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and communities, and Civic Science Fellow at the Rita Allen Foundation. Kathy was a Shorenstein Fellow and currently Adjunct Faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where she teaches Product Management and Society. She was also a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) at Harvard, Faculty Affiliate of the Public Interest Tech Lab, and Co-Lead of the Responsible Computer Science Challenge and Co-Founder of the Mozilla Builders Incubator at Mozilla.
Kathy has been recognized as Georgia Tech’s 40 Under 40, Georgia Tech College of Computing Hall of Fame Rising Star, First Lady Michelle Obama’s 2015 Guest to the State of the Union Address, a finalist in the StarCraft II After Hours Gaming League, Nguoi Viet’s 40 under 40, and worldwide champion at the Imagine Cup Technology Competition. Her work has been featured in Fast Company, Wired, Politico, TechCrunch, NPR, VentureBeat, Nguoi Viet, and the Huffington Post. Kathy holds degrees in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Supelec in Metz, France.
Kathy can also be found looking for surf spots along the New England coast, experimenting with recipes that coordinate with Formula 1 grand prix locations, and coaching grade school soccer.
