2026 Speakers

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.

Ganesh is a lead Product designer with over 10 years of experience, leading the UX design and research of large-scale enterprise and consumer applications. He currently leads UX design for enterprise AI/ML experiences in Amazon. He has driven over 10 plus product launches saving $140 million+. Additionally , he has Scaled UX from the ground up as a founding designer in three organizations including Qualcomm and Sound Transit. He possesses extensive multi-domain expertise, encompassing SaaS, AI, Developer tools, banking and fintech, media and entertainment, as well as government agencies. He is also a board member of design forward alliance and chair of SIGCHI Puget sound. His articles on HCI and product design have been featured in the AI journal and Business Insider.

Honor Bowman Hall (b. 1984) is an artist and experienced arts administrator and academic leader living and working in Atlanta, GA. Bowman Hall graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with an MFA in Painting in 2014, and after moving to Anchorage, AK to teach and manage and not-for-profit contemporary art gallery, returned to SCAD in 2017 to join the faculty.

Bowman Hall has since served SCAD as a professor of Foundation Studies and Painting, Associate Chair of Foundation Studies, Chair of Fine Arts, Associate Dean of the Schools of Foundation Studies and Fine Arts, Dean of the Schools of Fine Arts and Visual Communication, and most recently, Executive Dean of Academic Services.

Under her leadership as Chair of Fine Arts, enrollment in the School of Fine Arts increased 20%. Under her leadership as Dean of the School of Fine Arts, enrollment increased an additional 16% while her leadership as Dean of the School of Visual Communication saw the Illustration program at SCAD grow to the second largest program at the university. Her leadership contributed to several national and international awards and competition wins for SCAD Painting, Photography, and Illustration students.

As Executive Dean, Bowman Hall is the senior academic leader at SCAD Atlanta and leads a team of six Associate Deans and Deans. In her role, she spearheads/contributes to initiatives in all of SCAD's locations across Atlanta, Savannah, SCADNow Online, and Lacoste, France. Her accomplishments in each academic leadership role center on her work to build community, grow enrollment, promote student and alumni employment in creative fields, secure student accolades and awards, and to ensure that student work in all programs reaches professional quality.

Bowman Hall is a practicing painter, and her artwork is represented by galleries Kai Lin Art (Atlanta) and SCAD Art Sales (Savannah, Atlanta, online).  She has created murals on commission across the United States in the public sector. Her paintings appear in collections across the US and abroad. She has experience leading and managing teams of high performing educators, developing curriculum and course content, and teaching art to students at all levels from elementary school to graduate students enrolled in an MFA program.

As Director of UX Research at Rubrik, Priyanka Raju leads the user research function across the full product portfolio, strategically supporting the company's ascent as the world's leading Data and AI Security Platform. Priyanka is a recognized leader in scaling research practices to connect deep user understanding directly to tangible business results. Her comprehensive experience includes a decade of driving product success, from providing strategic consulting to Fortune 500 clients (such as American Express, Pepsi, M&T Bank, Takeda, and Eli Lilly) to accelerating growth at nascent startups. Her foundation in design strategy and architecture drives her commitment to transforming complex user insights into powerful narratives that shape industry-defining user experiences.

Clara Kliman-Silver is a UX strategist based in New York City. Currently, she works as a UX research manager on the Material Design team at Google and volunteers with local UX communities. Her research focuses on the emergent role of artificial intelligence in UX design, design systems, metrics frameworks for measuring product development, and developer experience.

Paige is a user experience professional with over 20 years of experience between global consultancies, start-ups, and in-house.

I’m a Senior Researcher with a quant + qual background, currently serving as User Research Lead for AIOps + GenAI at Splunk > a Cisco Company. My expertise lies in strategic research—my work has directly influenced product roadmaps and led to the introduction of new features across our toolkit spanning AIOps, Observability, and Generative AI. Over the years, I’ve led company-wide research programs, developed frameworks for experiential baselining, and designed large-scale UXR strategies focused on research democratization. I believe that cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder alignment are essential to impactful research—partnering closely with Data Science, Engineering, and Design teams, while negotiating roadmap priorities with PMs and senior leadership at the Director and VP levels. Living in San Francisco, I’m deeply inspired by the intersection of technology and human behavior—a curiosity that ultimately led me to pursue User Experience Research as a career. Beyond my full-time role, I’m also an independent researcher and writer in Human-Computer Interaction, exploring topics such as Human-AI collaboration and Human-XR experiences.

With decades of experience in UX research, Marcos has led impactful work at Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, GetYourGuide, and Choco Communications. He is currently a Staff UX Researcher at Meta Reality Labs Research, where he focuses on complex qualitative research, emerging technology, and long-term user adoption. At Meta, he has also led internal explorations into how UXRs can meaningfully integrate AI into their workflows. He values UX360 as a space that fosters community, connection, and the exchange of ideas across the UXR community, especially at a time when our tools, contexts, and roles are rapidly evolving.

Philip Burgess is a UX Research Leader with over 2 decades of experience turning human insight into measurable business impact. Over his career, he’s built and led research programs across startups and enterprise organizations, helping teams move from assumptions to evidence and from data to confident decisions.

Philip is known for blending deep qualitative understanding with analytical rigor to shape product strategy, elevate research maturity, and show how thoughtful UX research drives clarity, confidence, and ROI. He’s passionate about mentoring emerging researchers and championing the role of research as a strategic driver of innovation and trust.

Outside of work, Philip finds balance through yoga and road cycling—two passions that keep him grounded, focused, and inspired to keep exploring how people move, think, and connect.

Sarah Kling is a Senior UX Researcher on Amazon's Apps and Games Research Team within Devices, where she leads strategic research initiatives that shape product strategy and drive measurable business outcomes. Her work spans foundational market research, customer segmentation, and product validation across Amazon's device ecosystem, including research that validated multi-billion dollar revenue opportunities and influenced Amazon's multi-OS browser strategy. Sarah specializes in AI integration in research workflows and maintains a weekly LinkedIn thought-leadership series helping research teams transition from experimentation to systematic AI capability. She has spoken at the Insight Association's Ignite AI Conference on building AI-capable research teams and developed frameworks for moving organizations from individual ChatGPT usage to strategic AI integration. Her research on AI adoption shows qualitative analysis time reductions of 4x and has informed best practices for hybrid human-AI research models. Her research has directly informed executive decision-making at the VP level and driven significant improvements in product adoption and user engagement across Amazon's device portfolio.

Niels Schillewaert, PhD, is Head of Research & Methods at Conveo.ai – an end-to-end AI-led insights platform. Niels combined entrepreneurship and commercial research with academic research throughout his career. He was a co-founder at Human8 (formerly InSites Consulting) and has a strong academic background as a Professor of Marketing at the Vlerick Business School. His research was published in leading scientific journals such as Journal of Marketing, The International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Services Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and others. Niels is a frequent speaker at international conferences and has guest lectured at several academic institutions e.g. Columbia, NYU, University of Georgia. He is the Former President of ESOMAR – the association of the global insights and analytics community.

Amit Sathe, UX Research Director, Docusign Amit is a UX Research Director at Docusign. Amit has grown and scaled user research and Research Operations (ResOps) practices at DocuSign, IBM (Data-AI), and Rockwell Automation. With a diverse background spanning Engineering, Human Factors, and eBusiness, Amit has navigated various UX and Design disciplines throughout his professional journey, encompassing both consulting and in-house positions. His core strengths lie in advocating for the pivotal role of user research and insight-driven approaches within product development, ultimately aiming to deliver a world-class product experience that consistently exceeds user expectations.