Kathy Pham

Kathy Pham is a computer scientist, product leader and entrepreneur who has held roles in product management, software engineering, data science, consulting, and leadership across the private, non-profit, and public sectors. In 2024, she was named Anitab.org’s highest honor of the ABIE Technical Leadership Award for leading or developing a product, process, or innovation that made a notable impact on business or society. She is the Vice-President of Artificial Intelligence at Workday, serves as Senior Advisor at Mozilla, and on faculty at Harvard University. In government, Pham was appointed the inaugural Executive Director of the National AI Advisory Committee, served as the Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the Federal Trade Commission, appointed to a generative AI Taskforce, and was a founding product and engineering member of the United States Digital Service at the White House.

Pham’s private sector leadership has spanned Google, IBM, and Harris Healthcare. Pham has served on the advisory boards of the Blue Tulip Ventures, Anita Borg Institute, the Georgia Tech College of Computing, the “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck” initiative, Civic Signals, Startups and Society, FWD50, and Fortune 500 companies. Pham was the Co-Founder and Co-Lead of the Responsible Computer Science Challenge and founder of the Mozilla Builders Incubator at Mozilla. She also co-founded the Ethical Tech Working Group at Harvard and focuses on ethics and social responsibility with an emphasis on engineering culture, artificial intelligence, and computer science curricula. She was a Fellow in Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence at the MIT Media Lab and Berkman Klein Center, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and communities, and Civic Science Fellow at the Rita Allen Foundation. Pham is a Shorenstein Center Senior Fellow and Adjunct Faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she teaches Product Management and Society.

Pham is a proud soccer coach, partner, parent of three, and daughter of Vietnamese refugees. In 2021, Pham established an endowment at Georgia Tech for computer science majors with demonstrated financial need. The Mary Hương Thị Phạm Scholarship is awarded annually and honors Pham's late mother, Mary, and "single parents, and resilient fighters who push for the best for themselves, their families, and their societies."

Pham completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, Georgia) and Supelec (Metz, France).