Gloria Osardu, PhD is an experienced senior business strategy executive with 18+ years of experience leading customer insights and analytics teams; providing the right data, insights, and opportunities to the right leaders, ensuring decisions and prioritization are made with the right information. Gloria has built, led, and scaled teams (researchers, analysts, operations, and CX insights) and driven strategy at some of the world's most successful global companies (both Fortune 500 and startups). Gloria currently leads the global consumer research organization at Yahoo! Her UXRs, Brand, and Marketing researchers, Analysts, and Consumer Insights Researchers provide actionable insights and recommendations that inform consumer-first strategies and product decisions across Yahoo's Products, Brand Properties, and Services.Before Yahoo, Gloria led global research teams within industries such as Gen AI, SaaS, Education, Supply Chain, Finance/Fintech, Payroll, and Federal Government Contracting. She believes that durable insights and research in a world of big data and AI are the keys to de-risking business and customer experience decisions. She advocates strongly for equitable, ethical, and accessible, research practices and utility for ALL.

Sarah Bentley is Director of User Experience and Service Design at The Coca Cola Company, where she leads research driven design efforts to create seamless customer and consumer experiences across physical and digital environments. With 15 years of experience at the intersection of human behavior and technology, she focuses on exploring how people think, feel, and act through UX research to inform thoughtful, practical design decisions. Her work in end-to-end journey management has translated qualitative and quantitative insights into scalable experience strategies that improve usability, efficiency, and satisfaction across complex systems.

Jeta Surman is a strategic research and insights executive with over 15 years of experience driving growth and innovation across fintech, payments, and digital platforms. She currently serves as Vice President and Head of UX Research at American Express, where she built and leads a global research organization supporting commercial cards, payments, and banking products. Known for aligning customer intelligence with business strategy, Jeta has held senior research leadership roles at Square, Twitter, and Kabbage, and is a champion of accessibility, inclusion, and cross-functional innovation. She is also the co-founder of Ladies That UX, NYC chapter, mentoring the next generation of design and research leaders.

Cheryl Abellanoza is a dynamic UX research leader who combines her background in clinical and cognitive neuroscience with user experience expertise as Associate Director of UX Research at Verizon Connect. With a passion for building "highly successful, intelligent, passionate, innovative, and fun" research teams, she transforms customer insights into actionable strategies using her signature "3 Cs" philosophy—Cognition, Culture, and Creativity. Learn more about her at cherylabellanoza.com or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cherylabellanoza/

James Villacci is a seasoned UX leader with over 15 years of experience in human-centered design, human factors, and applied cognition. As Director of UX Research & Research Platform at HelloFresh, he built the company’s global “Research Kitchen” from the ground up — evolving it from a team of one into a cross-organizational capability that powers AI-augmented discovery, insight reuse, and UX observability across brands worldwide. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and K5 German TV, showcasing his thought leadership in scaling research, democratizing insights, and transforming customer understanding into measurable business impact.

Utkarsh Seth is a Senior Staff UX Research Manager at Google. Utkarsh has over 15 years of industry experience in the field of UX. His primary focus is to enable organizations to shape user experiences that are crafted, useful and usable. Over the last several years he has built and scaled multiple complex UX teams both within and outside the United States. His work revolves around empowering his team to achieve UX excellence by coaching people not only in their craft but also integrating in the product development process and co-own the product life cycle. Outside of his core UX work, Utkarsh is deeply passionate about coaching and mentoring aspiring UXers entering the field. He has been collaborating with Savannah College of Art and Design over the past 8 years to bridge the gap between academia and industry. His work has been published in Worth Magazine, Augusta Chronicle & Fast company. More recently, Utkarsh has been a close advisor on the UX Research program SCAD has launched. Utkarsh continues to ensure that the curriculum is informed by the needs of businesses that hire for the role and that the students are going through coursework that will fulfill those needs.