Leading Your Career: A Panel Discussion

Do you want to learn about becoming a leader in academia? Maybe you want to be a team leader within your lab or your workplace? Are you interested in the challenges of being an entrepreneur or being the person helping entrepreneurs succeed?

ILead:Grad is excited to present "Leading Your Career", a discussion on leadership during which a diverse set of panelists will try to answer these questions and more. As we will find out over the course of this panel, leadership is not a goal; it is a process. And leadership is not a single skill; it is a spectrum of skills adaptable to various environments.

Scroll down for more information on our esteemed panelists.

Prof. Doug Reeve, PhD, founding Director of the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering at the University of Toronto (2010-2018). Before returning to the University, Professor Reeve worked with industry as a consultant and president of a small consulting firm for 15 years, frequently on international assignments.

Cailin Hillier, MASc, MBA, Venture Manager at the Creative Destruction Lab Toronto. Prior to joining the Lab, Cailin was the Program Coordinator for Canadian Water Network’s Municipal Water Consortium. She has in-depth knowledge and experience identifying and achieving partnership development opportunities, communicating actionable insights from technical research, and designing nation-wide programming to enhance strategic alignment and innovation.

Lawrence Mandel, MSc, Director of Production Engineering leading Shopify’s Developer Acceleration team. He previously worked at IBM and Mozilla where he started as a software developer before transitioning into leadership roles. Through all his work experience, he’s learned to understand the meaning of time management and to prioritize the most important things in his life, which are his family, health, and work.

Sobhan Etemadi, PhD, founder and CEO of Sobie Systems–a Canadian company focused on designing and manufacturing intelligent IoT technologies for the HVAC sector. Over the past two years he and his company have been recognized by numerous organizations including Ryerson University’s Norman ESCH Engineering Award; the winner of the 2018 National CNE Innovation Garage; accepted into NEXT Canada’s prestigious Next36 program; and more recently his company was accepted into the Creative Destruction Lab accelerator.