Faculty

Naeem Zafar

Faculty Lead; Core Business & Professional Skills

Naeem Zafar is a faculty member at the University of California Berkeley as well as the Northeastern University and a professor of the practice at Brown University. He has taught entrepreneurship and new venture finance since 2005. As a serial entrepreneur, he co-founded and served as the CEO of several companies, including Bitzer Mobile, which was acquired by Oracle in November 2013. He is currently the founder and CEO of TeleSense, an industrial internet of things (IoT) company. Zafar has published several cases in Harvard Business Publishing and has authored five books. He has an Sc.B. degree from Brown University.

Sophie Asher

Sales & Marketing; Company Culture

Sophie Asher is International Program Manager at Coinbase. Previously she led Product Marketing at Productboard after having built her career in Go-to-market (GTM) strategy at Salesforce and Twilio. She graduated from Brown with a B.A. in Medieval Studies and started her career in finance before moving into tech. She helped drive Salesforce’s global enterprise, inside, and Asia-Pacific sales strategy and worked on email automation platform Pardot.

"It is incredibly empowering to show people what no one taught me in the early stages of my professional career. We are synthesizing what took me 25+ years to learn in this compact format that is bound to change the trajectory of careers for our participants." - Naeem Zafar, NU Accel Faculty Lead

Dr. Gary Katzenstein

Organizational Behavior & Leadership; Organizational Politics & Effectiveness

Gary Katzenstein’s professional background covers three main areas: Leadership and Organizational Behavior, Innovation/Design Thinking, and International Management and Strategy. While living in Asia for over a decade (Japan, Korea, Hong Kong/China), he worked on strategic, organizational, and cross-cultural issues in both local companies and multi-nationals. Gary has a degree from Brown University and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. He currently teaches at UC Davis and Rice University and previously has taught at UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, Cornell and NYU.

Dr. Brian Strope

Interviewing Skills & Technique

Brian Strope worked as a Research Scientist at Google for 14 years. He helped start and improve Google’s speech recognition, and later led research for Ray Kurzweil in natural language understanding. His team’s projects help improve many of Google’s public-facing applications. Before that he was part of the research team at the speech recognition company Nuance (the original Nuance). His dissertation at UCLA was in auditory modeling and electrical engineering. Previously he designed workstations for Hewlett Packard. Today, he’s a father and a full-time musician.

"Interviews, particularly technical interviews here, can be intimidating and awful. Understanding what's really happening can make it easier to show up as yourself. I'm incredibly honored to help people feel more comfortable with the process. And I enjoy the open discussions about choosing a job and navigating current corporate culture." - Dr. Brian Strope, NU Accel Faculty

Michael Rubin

Job Search Preparation & the Current Market

Michael is currently working as a Director of Engineering at Google where he is responsible for parts of search infrastructure. Prior to this role, he spent time managing Kubernetes, GKE, Anthos and Linux with Google. Before coming to Google 14 years ago, he was a Senior Engineer at Network Appliance. Michael has a degree from Brown University.