Every year our EmpowerWISM panel of judges is carefully selected to ensure we have an array of highly established and diverse experts within the transportation industry. This year it is no different. The skillsets and experience each panelist brings to the table is unique with backgrounds in both the public and private sectors. Our aim was to enlist the expertise of men and women who have been involved with other female-orientated programs, promoting equality and inclusivity, particularly within the mobility arena.
Keep reading to find out the industry experts that will be the jury panel for our Empower Women in Shared Mobility Award!
EmpowerWISM 2023 Jury Panel
Founder & CEO, movmi
Sandra is a world-wide expert in shared mobility and at movmi, she has worked on over 70 international projects. She has won the TED Next Visionary and BC Business Change Maker Awards and is also a Clean50 Honoree. Sandra is a TED alumni speaker and also teaches at universities to share what she has learnt on her shared mobility journey.
Urban Mobility Consultant
Sergio Avelleda is an urban Mobility consultant with Urucuia: Mobilidade Urbana, former Secretary of Urban Mobility and Transports in Sao Paulo, and former President of Subway Company and Suburban Trains Company in São Paulo.
Director of Policy & TDM, Stanford University
After more than 15 years in consulting, Jessica joined Stanford University in 2017 as an internal and external liaison on transportation policy matters. She is currently Stanford Transportation’s Director of Policy & TDM. Prior to Stanford, she was a sustainable transportation planner at Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates and Trivector Traffic, two thought leaders on transportation solutions that put people first.
Co-Founder & CEO, Veo
Candice Xie is the Co-Founder and CEO of Veo, in fact, she’s the only woman CEO of a major e-scooter company today. Previous to her job at Veo, she work at Schneider Electric, the Bank of China and MassMutual Financial Group. Candice uses her experience and background in financial analytics to advance Veo through a dynamic regulatory environment toward efficient and effective expansion. We first met Candice and Veo as a stand out applicant during our first EmpowerWISM program.
Expert in Mobility, Marketplaces & Investment Management
Boris Pilichowski, CFA is a French national with an engineering degree from École des Mines de Paris. He started his career in capital markets working for different investment banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank) as a salesperson then a trader in the banks’ principal investment groups. After 20 years on the “investment side” of business, Boris decided to join the “operational side” by taking-over the start-up Karhoo and becoming its co-CEO in 2017.
Today Boris uses his expertise as a banker, an investor and a tech entrepreneur to work with young companies and help them scale their operations and find adequate capital to fuel their development.
Executive Director, OMI Foundation
OMI is a new-age policy research and social innovation think tank. She’s a member of the Global Futures Council of the World Economic Forum, Advisor – Global Partnership for Informal Transportation, Member of CII National Committees on Industrial Relations, Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, and Salzburg Global Fellow. An M.Sc. in Sociology from the University of Oxford (UK), a mobility entrepreneur and academic in her previous avatars, Aishwarya is committed to the cause of sustainable development.
Check out the EmpowerWISM Prize Package Below 👇












More prizes to be announced soon on our social media channels!
Assessment Criteria
The intake form has a series of short questions that allow you to showcase your vision, product/service and business. The judges will then assess each application based on the following categories: vision, leadership and innovation. We have built out a subset of questions that we’ll use to guide our evaluation;
VISION
- Is the venture majority women owned or controlled or managed?
- How well is the vision articulated?
- Is the vision aligned to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals?
- Does the solution support efforts around transportation equity?
LEADERSHIP
- How well demonstrated is your market know-how?
- What are the unique strengths of your team?
- What’s your growth strategy?
- Is the solution super specific to one city/community or has potential to scale?
INNOVATION
- What’s unique about your product/service?
- Is ‘technology’ one of your innovation pillars?
- What need does your product/service solve in the transportation value chain?
Big Thanks To Our EmpowerWISM Partners
