Speakers

Kathleen Hurley is a former senior executive for numerous educational publishing and technology companies, including IBM and Pearson. Currently, she is a senior advisor to educational technology companies, education associations, and school superintendent networks. She also serves on the board of directors for several non-profit and for-profit organizations. After retiring from Pearson, she was selected as a Fellow of the Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI) at Harvard University. Upon completion of the program, she co-founded a global nonprofit organization, Girls Thinking Global, which has since merged with the Women’s Education Project (WEP), where she serves on the board of directors. WEP works with NGOs in India and Bangladesh to provide a highly effective, locally resourced, holistic program to help young, marginalized women become earners, leaders and changemakers in their communities.

In 2004, Kathy was inducted in the Association of Educational Publishers’ Hall of Fame and in 2019, she received the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award in Education Technology from the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA). In 2022, she received the 2022 Founders Award from the National Coalition for Technology in Education & Training (NCTET), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendent (ALAS), the inaugural Distinctive Mentor Award from the Education Research and Development Institute (ERDI) and the RTM Education Rock Star award. She is co-author, with Dr. Bobbi Kurshan of InnovateHERs: Why Purpose-Driven Entrepreneurial Women Rise to the Top, which was published in April of 2022 and she is co-editor, with Priscilla Shumway, of Real Women, Real Leaders: Surviving and Succeeding in the Business World (Wiley), published in 2015.