Dr (Bozhena) Bo Kelestyn is a design thinking academic and practitioner with a diverse teaching and consulting portfolio. She created and led a number of interdisciplinary modules on design thinking, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Bo is the Course Director of the MSc Management of Information Systems and Digital Innovation (which she is also an alumna of). Outside of academia, Bo is an Innovation Consultant at Sprint Valley and Untapped Pricing. Bo worked with The Guardian Masterclasses as their lead design thinking masterclass tutor.

Bo is also the Founder and Course Director for the pioneering Masters level programme Leadership for Educational Transformation, aimed at supporting the rebuilding and transformation of education in Ukraine. Bo has a growing profile in Ukraine having delivered a design thinking workshop for the Science2Business programme. She is a national lecturer with the Ukrainian Leadership Academy, has collaborated on programmes and initiatives with GoGlobal, Kyiv National University, Ukrainian Catholic University, Kyiv School of Economics, and was one of top speakers at the Teachers of the Future conference in June 2024.

Bo holds several awards for her contributions to teaching & learning. She is one of the youngest at Warwick to hold the Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy and only one of three at Warwick to hold the Fellowship of Enterprise Educators UK. Bo defended her doctoral thesis on digital innovation at the age of 28, making her one of the youngest PhDs in Ukraine. Bo was educated at the University of Warwick (PhD, MSc, PGA, PGA) and the University of Durham (BA). Prior to moving to the UK in 2007, Bo finished the state Lyceum No 1 in Rohatyn, Ivano-Frankivsk region (formerly Rohatyn School No 1).

Topic Design Thinking: Empowering Innovators and Scientists of Tomorrow

Description In this session, we will explore the value of human centered innovation for scientists, innovators and change makers. The challenges of the 21st century are becoming more complex and interdisciplinary. Whether you're a seasoned scientist, an aspiring entrepreneur, or a curious young innovator, as a community, our ways of solving those challenges need to remain generative too. By leveraging the best and the latest technology and research, we need to ensure our ideas and solutions are developed mindfully, ethically and sustainably, designed with and not just for. Design thinking as a mindset, tool and skillset can help us with figuring our the how without loosing sight of the why.

Member of the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea), corresponding member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, professor, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Head of the Cell Biology and Biotechnology Department at the Institute of Food Biotechnology and Genomics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Her scientific interests include fundamental studies of plant stress resistance at the molecular and cellular levels, the development of new areas in nanotechnology — particularly "green" synthesis of nanomaterials — and research into using bioinformatics and structural biology to identify compounds for agriculture and medicine.
Alla Yemets is the author of more than 200 scientific papers. She has guided 12 candidates of sciences and currently supervises five PhD students.

Michael Simbirsky earned PhD in Math from Kharkiv Karazin National University after doctoral studies at the Institute for Low-Temperature Physics. He worked as a software engineer and algorithm developer in Israel and the USA in areas ranging from computational geometry to image recognition to electromagnetic and finance. After joining Google Research, Michael developed machine learning models to personalize user search results and advertisements.

He joined Nova Ukraine in 2014. He is coordinating financial planning for Nova Ukraine’s broad humanitarian efforts.

Mariana has professional experience in natural language processing (NLP), ranging from developing low-level tools such as parsers to creating sentiment analysis and fact-mining systems. In recent years, she has been working as the technical manager of a team of computational linguists at Grammarly, where she develops algorithms for error correction and text improvement.
Mariana promotes computational linguistics in Ukraine, collaborates with Ukrainian universities to enhance education in this field, conducts summer schools, supervises theses, and co-authored the Natural Language Processing Course at Projector. Mariana actively advocates for the development of tools for studying the Ukrainian language, co-organizes the Ukrainian NLP workshop, and the accompanying competition.
Recently, Mariana has been exploring the possibilities and limits of large language models, though her primary interest remains structural linguistics as a method for formalizing natural language.

About Grammarly:
Founded in 2009 by Ukrainians Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, and Dmytro Lider, Grammarly specializes in developing online tools for checking grammar, spelling, style, and tone in written text. Grammarly has grown rapidly due to its innovative technology, which uses artificial intelligence to analyze text in real-time. In 2012, the company attracted more than a million users. In 2017, the company received $110 million in investment from venture capital investors, including General Catalyst, IVP, and Spark Capital. This funding helped Grammarly accelerate its technology development and expand into new markets. In 2019, Grammarly raised an additional $90 million in a funding round, valuing the company at over $1 billion and officially giving it unicorn status.
Grammarly's AI-powered English writing technology operates across multiple platforms and devices, including over 500,000 apps and websites.
Grammarly has over 30 million daily users, and its product is utilized by more than 500,000 companies worldwide. The company’s headquarters is in San Francisco, but a significant part of the development team remains based in Ukraine.