In the 40th anniversary of the Silicon Valley YWCA’s celebration of excellent female leaders, five NVIDIANs were honored today for making significant contributions in their executive and professional roles.
The Tribute to Women Awards, announced during Women’s History Month in March, recognized NVIDIA’s Heidi Castagna, Anne Hecht, Stephanie Johnson and Roopa Prabhu.
In addition, Bridget Bissell was honored with an Emerging Leader award.
Each was also recognized for the ways they give back to the community — through, for example, mentoring, supporting charitable efforts for social justice and environmental relief, and volunteering in educational settings.
The YWCA is one of the oldest and largest women’s groups working for social and economic change around the world.
In the four decades the organization has held the Tribute to Women Awards, more than 1,400 women have been recognized, including nearly 50 from NVIDIA.
Learn More About NVIDIA’s Honorees
Heidi Castagna, Senior Director of Global Field Enablement and Education Services
Heidi leads a team responsible for helping employees in NVIDIA’s worldwide sales organization and its channel partners acquire the knowledge, skills and strategies needed to achieve commercial success. She also leads a team that educates customers on the deployment, troubleshooting and maintenance of NVIDIA technologies.
Anne Hecht, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Enterprise Computing
Anne leads a specialized product marketing team that manages the introduction and lifecycle of NVIDIA software products in enterprise markets. Her leadership has been key to the success of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform, which enables companies across industries to more easily build and operate proprietary AI.
Stephanie Johnson, Vice President of Global Consumer Marketing
Stephanie implements innovative consumer marketing strategies and has pioneered processes for weekly marketing campaigns that enabled NVIDIA products to take industry-leading positions. For example, her efforts helped take NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW cloud gaming platform from beta to its current state of having more than 30 million users.
Roopa Prabhu, Director of Engineering for Applied AI Services and Infrastructure
Roopa leads a cross-functional team of engineers working on accelerated solutions in conversational AI, generative AI and computer vision AI, with a focus on building developer-friendly platforms and enhancing their deployment in modern cloud environments. She spearheads efforts to create safe, streamlined security practices for platforms and AI services. Roopa advocates for the integration of generative AI and other technologies into her team’s processes to boost efficiency and productivity, including for developing security requirements.
Bridget Bissell, System Design Manager
Bridget has led engineering for various products in the NVIDIA Jetson lineup of modules and developer kits for edge AI and robotics. She helped design the first NVIDIA system-on-a-chip module in accordance with automotive standards for use in self-driving cars. This module is now deployed across Chinese electric vehicle-maker NIO’s fleet of self-driving cars.
Learn more about NVIDIA life, culture and careers.