Line up of Speakers Announced for Stargazing in Education Webinar

Our expert panellists and speakers will deliver sessions designed to inspire leaders in education during the webinar event, Stargazing on Education: Reflecting on the Building Blocks for Digital Transformation of Schools in collaboration with HP / Intel and GESS. Taking place on the 28 April, 16:00 GST / UAE, 14:00 EET/Egypt, 15:00 AST / Qatar.

Speakers confirmed: 

Vishnu Taimni, Managing Director Middle East & Turkey, UAE, HP Inc.
Vishnu Taimni is the Managing Director and Vice President at HP Middle East and Turkey. Prior to this Vishnu was the Print Category lead for HP’s ISE region where he was responsible for driving profitable growth in the Print Business.

Vishnu has over 20 years’ experience in the tech industry, having been with HP since Compaq’s merger with Hewlett Packard in 2002. He joined the Computing Category division at Compaq in 2000 then after the merger, Vishnu held several category and channel management positions in both the consumer and commercial segments in the Middle East. From 2008 to 2010 Vishnu worked in South Africa as the Country Category Manager for South Africa’s computing business and then as District manager for Southern and Eastern Africa leading the entire sales and product functions for the region.

From here Vishnu moved to India where he worked as the Consumer Channel Director in India responsible for leading a sales and marketing team which took HP to a strong market leadership position. In 2016, Vishnu went on to become EMEA Head of the Home Printing Solutions business based out of Barcelona, Spain, before moving to Dubai, UAE where he served as Print Category lead for ISE ahead of his most recent ascension to Managing Director, HP Middle East & Turkey.

Keynote: Sally Jeffery, Partner and Global Education & Skills Practice Leader, PwC Middle East
Sally is based in Dubai and leads PwC’s global education and skills practice.  She has a broad range of strategic and operations consulting experience across all the sectors of education.  Sally joined PwC's ME advisory practice in early 2007. Prior to PwC, Sally worked for over 15 years as a strategy consultant and has worked extensively across the US,  Europe and the Middle East. Sally is now driving the development of PwC’s education service offering including: transformational services for higher education, capacity expansion and quality improvement services for primary and secondary education and the development of new types of applied degree programmes that meet employer needs in developing markets. Sally has a keen interest in helping to bridge the gap between the competencies CEO’s are looking for in the future, and the approach being adopted by today’s educators and has contributed to a number of reports and articles linked to PwC's work on workforce of the future (see https://www.pwc.com/futureworkforce).

She has led projects across the Middle East looking at bridging skills gaps in several high demand areas including: culture and the arts, tourism and hospitality, sports, security and defense, retail management. She has an undergraduate degree in Business Administration from Loughborough University, an MBA from the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, and an MSc in Applied Psychology from the University of Liverpool. She will shortly be publishing a paper at the 2021 World Government Summit, onthe recommendations for regulating education in the post-covid world.

Moderator: Mayank Dhingra, Senior Education Business Lead, Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, HP Inc.
Mayank Dhingra leads the Education Business Vertical for Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe at HP Inc. His role is to provide commercial headship, strategic direction, solution frameworks, social-capital curation and thought leadership to the Education business line. Mayank works with National and Regional Education Ministries to positively impact country level education policy and to evangelize HP’s education proposition. He is currently spearheading the development of HP’s Remote Learning Program, Smart Classroom Ecosystem, Innovation Labs, Digital Capability Development for Educators, and Pedagogy Consultancy Frameworks for governments and regulators.

He was previously with GEMS Education where he headed the Commercial line for a network of 50 Schools in MENASA region. In addition, he sat on the board of two schools. Prior to GEMS he was with the Emirates Group for nearly 15 years in two stints and his last role was Head of Global Technology Partnerships where he led a portfolio of over 450 vendor relations and program managed large scale collaboration projects with tech partners. His preceding role was Head of Customer Experience for dnata (Emirates Group) where he set up the line and managed the business technology, product, pricing and customer service functions across the network.

Mayank is a sought-after keynote speaker, author and moderator on EdTech subjects. He has spoken at prominent international conferences and his articles have appeared in leading publications. He has also been an active mentor for several talent management pools. Mayank is a certified Yoga teacher as well and the founder of a non-profit entity – Yogasmriti; which combines individual and community wellbeing. All proceeds from the initiative are directed to charitable causes supporting children in need. Mayank’s philanthropic work has been recognised at regional and international forums.

Eman Hamshari, Head of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Taaleem 
Head of Innovation and entrepreneurship at Taaleem. She has participated in events speaking and giving breakout sessions / workshops, master classes about smart designs and Art , boot camps about future careers, future of education, innovation impact on education and similar topics applying methods of Design Thinking at the core. Eman was a member of the organizing team of Global Innovation Challenge 2019. Also part of the Expo2020 school programme for students to promote innovative learning. She has a Master’s in Education with a major in International Management and Policy of Education. With over 15 years of experience, she has covered the full education spectrum from teaching, curriculum advising and building, and adopting innovation in schools creatively dealing with challenging cases using design thinking approaches.