Austin Live 2026: People & HR

Jeannie Virden currently serves as the EVP & Chief People Officer for Central Health, which includes CommUnityCare Health Centers and Sendero Health Plans. Her mission-driven approach to Human Resources focuses on designing and executing talent acquisition, talent management, development, and total rewards strategies that authentically reflect the organization's culture and values. Dedicated to the people who drive organizational success, she strives to elevate the team member experience and advance workforce excellence.

Before assuming her current role, Jeannie served as the Vice President of Human Resources at CommUnityCare Health Centers, Central Health's network of primary care clinics. She brings over fifteen years of healthcare-specific experience and holds a Master of Science in Human Resources Management and a Bachelor of Business Administration degree. Her professional affiliations include membership in the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM), Human Resource Certification Institute (HRCI), and Association for Advancing Physician & Provider Recruitment (AAPPR). Additionally, she holds certifications as a SHRM Senior Certified Professional (SHRM-SCP), Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR), and a Certified Physician/Provider Recruitment Professional (CPRP).

Jeannie is committed to shaping a stronger, more human-centered future for Human Resources within the healthcare landscape.

Jason Miller is Head of People Intelligence and AI at Natera, where he was one of the company's first AI hires, helping a 10,000-person genomics organization apply artificial intelligence to the fight against cancer. He is a founding member of Natera's AI Council and is responsible for building the systems, workflows, and enablement programs that put AI directly into the hands of non-technical people leaders.

Before Natera, Jason spent more than 20 years in talent acquisition leadership at Cloudera, VMware, and Roblox, spanning startup through public company stages. After Roblox, he co-founded SproutsAI, an AI-powered recruiting platform, before joining Natera to apply that builder experience at enterprise scale.

On the side, Jason co-founded PromptMates, a private AI community for HR and talent leaders that includes a weekly YouTube live stream regularly attended by thousands. His work across all of these efforts centers on a single belief: AI should be designed for the operators who use it, not managed by engineering on their behalf. He focuses on turning AI capabilities into repeatable, teachable workflows that free people leaders to spend more time on the creative, strategic, and deeply human work that technology cannot replicate.

Mary is an innovative professional whose career seamlessly intertwines journalism, fashion, and personal development. A proud HBCU graduate, she began as an on-air news reporter for ABC, where her passion for storytelling blossomed. With a master’s degree in journalism and a certificate in corporate public relations, complemented by international studies in Europe from the University of North Texas. She thrived from working in entertainment, sales, and now as a corporate recruiter for a prestigious global luxury fashion house, merging her love for fashion with talent acquisition.

Mary is inspired by her rich southern heritage that fuels her commitment to uplifting people of color and helping them realize their potential.

As a devoted mother, writer, and speaker, Mary balances her professional pursuits with personal passions like fitness and travel. She believes in fashion as a form of empowerment and self-expression, encouraging others to embrace their unique stories. With a vibrant personality and a heart full of purpose, Mary continues to inspire those around her, blending talent and innovation in meaningful ways.

William is the Vice President, Global Human Resources Operations at Circana.

Jeet Mukerji is the Co-founder and CEO of Kinfolk. Previously, he led the AI team as the lead Product manager at Beamery, where he helped scale the platform from Series A to Series C and worked with enterprise customers including Amazon. He brings deep experience building and operationalizing AI products for HR.

Hari Date is an expert in workplace recognition, employee engagement, and performance management. At Workhuman, Hari shapes strategies that foster positive workplace cultures, drive employee motivation, and enhance organizational success. With extensive experience in HR/HRIS and human-centric leadership, Hari has helped organizations leverage recognition and feedback to drive business outcomes. Additionally, Hari is a Professor, sharing insights on management, team dynamics, and leadership. Passionate about empowering individuals and organizations, Hari is committed to creating workplaces where people feel valued and inspired. 

Brittany Podolak joined athenahealth’s leadership team as the Chief People Officer in October 2022. She leads our culture; talent retention and acquisition; and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Before joining athenahealth, Brittany spent more than 20 years at Dell Technologies, Inc., where she most recently served as senior vice president of HR for global products and operations.

During her tenure at Dell, Brittany held numerous senior HR roles, including senior vice president of HR for global services, digital, and marketing; vice president of HR for global supply chain and operations; and vice president of talent acquisition for North America and Latin America. She believes in combining future-focused talent practices with data-driven decision making to advance business strategy while enabling team members to live and perform their best. Brittany has a BBA from Southern Methodist University and an MBA from San Diego State.

Emlyn De Leon is a Workforce Capability and Skills Transformation Leader who helps organizations turn skills strategy into decision-ready workforce capability systems for the AI era. Her work connects skills, proficiency, validation, workforce planning, talent mobility, stewardship, and employee adoption so leaders can understand how work is changing, identify capability gaps, and make stronger decisions about learning, mobility, readiness, and future workforce needs. She brings a practitioner’s perspective to designing human-centered systems in which technology enhances—not replaces—human judgment and potential.

Kelsey Bradshaw is the Newsletter Editor at City Cast Austin.

Based in Charleston, South Carolina, Mike Mosgrove serves as the Head of Solution Engineering at CodeSignal, leading the teams that evangelize CodeSignal’s AI-native skills solutions in the market and ensure customers drive the maximum value of their investments and partnerships with CodeSignal. Mike has worked and led teams in the HCM technology space for over 13 years at Oracle, SumTotal, Skillsoft, and Cornerstone. Mike is passionate about building empathetic connections with people, identifying talent, and leveraging AI to give individuals and organizations new opportunities for their advancement and betterment.

Dan Solomon writes about politics, music, food, sports, criminal justice, health care, film, and business. Dan started working with Texas Monthly as a freelancer in 2013 before becoming a staff writer, covering topics from the Baylor sexual assault scandal to the gentrification of Austin barbecue to the legacy of Texas outsider artist Daniel Johnston. His reporting has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired, Fast Company, Billboard, and Deadspin.

Carly Brush is the SVP of Strategy and Growth at DailyPay, the leader in On-Demand Pay helping employers modernize how people get their pay. With an MBA from Harvard Business School and a career spanning consumer tech, marketplace growth, and fintech, Carly has led business units at DoorDash before joining DailyPay, where she has been instrumental in expanding access to on-demand pay to over 6 million workers across the country. A passionate advocate for building cultures that empower people at every level of an organization, Carly brings a data-driven yet deeply human lens to the intersection of workforce strategy, financial wellness, and business growth. 

Courtney Sebesta began her professional journalism career 24 years ago at the Austin American-Statesman. She has held the titles of digital editor, reporter, senior editor and managing editor at the Statesman. She also led 7 national digital teams across the Gannett/USA Today Network. Her team collaborations have won Edward R. Murrow Awards, the prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award and was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for the Gold Medal for meritorious Public Service for Uvalde mass shooting coverage. In addition, her teams garnered numerous Online News Association Online Journalism Awards, an International News Media Association Award, Local Media Association awards, multiple Headliners Awards and Texas Managing Editors awards.

Kase Konkright learned what work means from his grandparents. She was a school cook. He was a janitor. Their work was essential, mostly unseen, and woven into their community, and they raised him to believe that work is contribution, that integrity beats recognition, and that success carries a responsibility beyond yourself. He carried that into a 25+ year career inside some of the world’s most demanding companies, sitting in the seats where hiring decisions couldn’t be undone. Global giants and family-run businesses, different scale, different complexity, the same human stakes. And across all of it, one pattern held: the hires that changed everything were never won by volume, process, or optics. They were won by judgment. Listening carefully. Asking better questions. Understanding the work beneath the title. He also watched what the recruiting industry did with those stakes: extractive fees, rushed searches, systems built to bill rather than to help. So he built the firm he kept wishing existed. Signal & Strand is that conviction with a business model around it: founder-led, relationship-first, priced honestly, and built to give a large portion of its profits back to the community, because his grandparents would have expected nothing less. The work lights him up as much as ever. Lately that's meant building and rebuilding C-suite teams for companies shifting to people-driven leadership models, then watching that shift show up where it counts, in revenue and margins. It's meant guiding clients through the AI and RPA struggles, where the hard question isn't which tools to buy, it's which leaders can carry people through the change. And it's meant pro-bono searches for non-profits that can't afford to get a hire wrong, the work he'd happily do all day. Outside of work, he’s kept honest by two dogs, Braxton and Tootsie, who enforce the daily disciplines of loyalty, presence, and care.

In his past life, Dave worked as an Underwriting Strategist at Blue Cross Blue Shield where he developed pricing methodologies designed to satisfy BCBS’s strategic and financial objectives. Acting as an internal liaison between actuarial, underwriting, and sales, he was instrumental in the development of the first official High-Deductible Health Plans (HDHPs) in the United States. He went on to assist BCBS’s efforts to expand the HDHP marketplace by aiding their lobbying efforts to push into law the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 (the HSA law).

Today, Dave spends much of his time traveling the country educating employers and legislative bodies on the many counterintuitive and nuanced components of effective health care cost management. A true educator, Dave uses an engaging presentation style to illustrate how many employers continue to be misled by the industry, resulting in double digit renewals, and forcing many to cut benefits and cost-shift to employees.

Dave is the National Director of Benefits & Financial Strategy at The Liberty Company, where he develops and maintains financial tools and methodologies enabling their clients to better manage their employer-sponsored health plans. Dave’s role keeps him actively involved in managing some of the company’s largest and most complicated accounts across the country.

David is an alumnus of the Carlson School of Management where he earned his Bachelor of Science in Business in 1987 and later received his Juris Doctor degree from Stanford Law School in 1990. Beyond his roles with Augeo, he contributes his expertise to various boards including ampliFi Loyalty Solutions, Star Tribune Media Company, and the Digital Commerce Alliance. David is equally committed to other non-profit endeavors, serving on a number of boards including newly formed Minnesota JCC as the first and immediate Past President and the board president of St. Paul Academy and Summit School. David's philanthropic endeavors are exhibited by a history of leading and co-leading multiple capital and endowment campaigns in the Twin Cities. Lastly, David actively supports early-stage ideas in both the commercial and non-profit sectors.

Katie Cunningham is the Director of Product within Augeo’s Workplace business unit, where she leads product strategy for a portfolio of enterprise platforms that power rewards, recognition, and incentive programs used by global organizations. She oversees a cross-functional team responsible for building technology that helps companies strengthen culture, improve performance, and measure the impact of their people investments at scale. Katie focuses on modernizing engagement platforms through AI-assisted experiences, personalization, and data-driven insights that connect employee recognition and incentives more directly to business outcomes. She brings a builder’s mindset shaped by both high-growth startups and large enterprise environments, working closely with HR and business leaders to translate evolving workforce strategies into scalable, future-ready products.

Dr. William Ferro is the founder and CEO of Betr Health, a gut-health-first metabolic reset program built on the premise that most chronic conditions trace back to inflammation and a disrupted microbiome. After building a physical medicine practice to more than 30 locations across seven states he concluded that the healthcare system's focus on managing systems through diet, medications, and exercise just wasn't cutting it. He started asking a different question: what’s getting in the way of the body working the way it’s supposed to? As the founder of Betr Health, he’s helped over 400,000. members feel better by removing the interference instead of piling on more solutions. Known for mixing science, common sense, and a little bit of rebellion, Dr. Ferro has a way of making people laugh, think, and occasionally question everything they thought they knew about health.

Tricia Erickson is the National Sales Director, Financial Wellness, at Norton LifeLock Benefit Solutions. She works with employers, consultants, and benefits leaders to improve workforce financial health through innovative wellness strategies, education, and employee engagement initiatives. A frequent speaker and advocate for financial well-being, Tricia specializes in helping organizations understand the connection between financial health, productivity, retention, and overall employee wellness

Melissa is the Chief Human Resources Officer at Powerfleet, bringing over 30 years of HR experience across Fortune 200 and 500 companies spanning technology, financial services, and supermarket retail. Prior to Powerfleet, she was Chief People Officer at Fourth, a hospitality workforce management company.

A certified Professional in Human Resources with a certification in Applied AI Change Management, Melissa has spent her career helping organizations move through periods of rapid transformation — building the organizational capability and leadership bench strength needed to adapt without losing sight of the people at the center of it. She thrives leading global initiatives in dynamic, fast-paced environments, with a particular passion for coaching, facilitation, and leadership development. Her mission: bring out the best in others.

She holds a BA in Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin, an MPA from Texas State University, and additional certifications in Organizational Development and Mediation/Conflict Resolution, alongside professional affiliations with several HR, OD, and coaching organizations.

Outside of work, Melissa dotes on her two nephews, Gael and Mauro, and travels internationally whenever she can (having left her heart in Italy many years ago). She's a devoted gym-goer, an avid reader, and — for the football fans in the room — a proud supporter of Arsenal FC.

Greg Zlevor is the President of Westwood International and Founder of HopeMakers, bringing over two decades of transformational leadership expertise to global organizations. As a 9-time #1 Amazon bestselling author and Wall Street Journal and international bestselling author, Greg has established himself as a premier voice in leadership development and organizational transformation.

With more than 20 years in the leadership and team development field, Greg has trained and coached over 20,000 global leaders across diverse industries and continents. His leadership programs consistently rank in the top 10%, reflecting his exceptional ability to drive meaningful change at both individual and organizational levels. As a Certified High-Performance Coach and GROW Model Coach, he brings proven methodologies that deliver measurable results.

Greg's client portfolio spans Fortune 500 companies and prestigious institutions, including Pfizer, McKesson, Intel, GE, Harvard University, Volvo, Boston University, Massachusetts General Hospital, the US Federal Government, United Airlines, and the Singapore Police Force. His global reach extends across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, South America, and the UK, with an experienced network of trainers and coaches ready for deployment worldwide.

Recognized with the Best-In-Class Global Coaching Leadership Award, Greg has maintained his position as a top facilitator at the Global Institute for Leadership Development for 15 consecutive years. His unique approach combines scientific insights with practical application, enabling leaders to navigate complex challenges while achieving sustainable growth.

Testimonials from senior executives consistently highlight Greg's "unparalleled communication of deeply simple principles" and his rare ability to get to the essence of leadership challenges. His transformational impact extends beyond the boardroom, with participants noting profound changes in both their professional effectiveness and personal fulfillment.

Greg's philosophy centers on the fundamental question: "Are you committed to working harder on yourself than you do on your job?" This principle guides his approach to developing authentic, high-performing leaders who create lasting positive change in their organizations and communities.  He is a board member of the Hope Foundation.

Emily Lewis-Pinnell is the Head of Global Workplace GenAI at Experian where she leads AI adoption and enablement for the global workforce. Her work combines the technical and people side of AI, driving innovative, responsible use of AI across the organization. She is the founder of Evaila, an AI adoption consulting firm focused on people-first AI adoption, organizational change and workforce transformation, and has served in leadership roles at companies including NTT DATA and Dell building and scaling cloud, data and AI practices and guiding hundreds of organizations through major technology transitions. She is active in several AI focused organizations, a member of Forbes Technology Council, and a Wharton and Stanford alumna.