Usha Jagannathan

Usha is a Principal Engineer at McKinsey & Company, bringing twenty years of digital transformation experience in building new technology ecosystems and empowering teams to create products that meet customer needs. Usha focuses primarily on rapid prototyping, architecting, coaching product development teams, and delivering custom digital cloud-native solutions to drive accelerated innovation.

Prior to McKinsey, she worked at a digital innovation research lab for Marsh & McLennan and before that she spearheaded the graduate degree program as a program chair for the IT engineering department at Arizona State University. She pioneered the concept of virtual IT labs immersion for online engineering degree programs to facilitate experiential learning within Arizona State University following her PhD dissertation. 

 Usha is a passionate STEM advocate and works to increase industry diversity through apprenticeship and work-study programs. She has contributed to several engineering articles and spoken in forums hosted by technical organizations including Women Who Code, Girls in Tech, Grace Hopper Women in Computing, and for Gender Equity in Science and Technology. 

Her interest in sustainability is to tackle climate change using technology by making a positive societal impact in creating efficient technology products/solutions to achieve decarbonization. Her research interests are towards building a sustainable cloud journey for the products she builds with her teams, developing responsible AI products involving AI ethics, governance, and focusing on projects involving Smart cities for sustainable urban development. Her recent paper on explainable AI can be found here.

Usha serves on the Industry Advisory Board for Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University and on the committee board for the AI/ML track for the Grace Hopper Conference event. Usha received her Bachelors in Electronics, Master’s in Computer Science from India and earned her PhD in Technology & E-learning from Arizona.