We are writing to share updates—both happy and sad— to the board’s membership.

First, we are excited to announce that Shelly Bensal (hackNY ’17) has joined the board.

Shelly is an AI research engineer at Writer, a full-stack generative AI platform for enterprises. She was previously at DeepMind and Google Research, where she worked on a wide range of problems including fairness of suggested searches, privacy assessments of facial recognition models, and synthetic speech detection. She focuses on bringing novel research into products in a useful and stable way, with an emphasis on building ethically & responsibly. She has a Bachelor’s degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. Outside of work, you can find Shelly doing pottery, skiing, hiking, and reading.

We are thrilled to have her experience, perspective, and dedication to hackNY’s mission on the Board.

At the same time, we are bidding a big thank-you and farewell to Sandile Keswa (hackNY ’14) as he steps down from the Board after more than two years of service. We are grateful to Sandile for the wisdom, time, leadership, and support he has contributed hackNY as a board member.

Please join us in welcoming Shelly to the Board and in thanking Sandile for his service— send a message on slack or shoot them an email!

With gratitude,
Andrea on behalf of the hackNY Board

PS: link to donate to hackNY 🌟