Emily’s career bridges industry, startups, and academia, with a focus on how people and technology can work better together. As CEO and co-founder of PairUp, an AI-powered platform transforming scattered company knowledge into actionable intelligence, she served leading enterprises like Hearst, RapidSOS, and Motorola. As an R&D researcher at Walt Disney Imagineering, she designed next-generation interactive experiences for the theme parks. At Meta, she was a researcher shaping how people connect online. At EF Education First, she led the Emerging Tech and Innovation team, designing learning technologies that reached millions of students worldwide.Emily has co-founded mission-driven organizations including Brave Initiatives, which equips women with coding and confidence to create for social impact, and Youth Lead the Change, a global civic leadership program developed in partnership with Harvard University.Emily holds a Ph.D. in Technology and Social Behavior from Northwestern University and a B.A. in Social Anthropology and Psychology from Harvard. Her academic work explores the intersection of AI, social behavior, and collaboration.

Recorded on March 9, 2026.

Links for this episode:

* LinkedIn

* Facebook

* Thoughtlucks

* Google Scholar‬

* Northwestern Magazine: “The most important thing you can do as a leader is to lift up others.”

* Brave Behind Bars (college-accredited introductory computer science and career-readiness program for incarcerated people)

* March 2026 SIKM Leaders Community Call: My Journey Building a KM Startup

* Other Podcast Appearances

* Other Video Appearances

Video Version