The Financial Women of San Francisco Scholarship Fund is governed by a Board of Directors comprising the Executive Board and Committee Chairpersons.
Please click on the board member's photo to read the biography.
Mona Ahmadi is a seasoned finance professional with 16 years of experience in financial planning and analysis (FP&A). Her journey with the Financial Women of San Francisco began in 2014 when she was awarded an FWSF scholarship while pursuing her MBA.
Currently, Mona works at a leading Fintech startup in Silicon Valley, where she continues to excel in her field. Her passion for finance, combined with her commitment to empowering and educating her community, led her to teach finance at Menlo College.
Mona also dedicates her expertise to nonprofit work. She has served as Treasurer and is currently a board member at TMC Community Capital, an organization providing affordable loans to small businesses, particularly those historically excluded from traditional financing. Through her professional and community work, Mona strives to create meaningful impact and promote financial inclusion and education.
As one of the co-founders of Quorum Private Wealth, Sue brings a decade of wealth management experience at Merrill Lynch and a decade of public accounting experience at Ernst & Young to her team and clients. Sue serves as a client relationship manager focused on developing financial strategies and advice for individuals, their families, and their businesses. She has a particular passion for working with women, to empower them with financial literacy. She works closely with her clients’ full team of advisors, including attorneys and accountants, to provide a coordinated approach to wealth management, including wealth transfer, tax minimization and estate planning.
She holds a BS in Accounting from Boston College and an MBA in Finance from Columbia University.
Karen Crowley is a Salesforce solutions engineer for ICONIQ Capital. She has designed and implemented Salesforce solutions for private equity and family office firms. She has 15 years of experience leading systems projects through their full development life cycle — requirements gathering, design, development, testing, training, implementation, ongoing enhancements and user support.
Karen also worked in regulatory and systems (SAP) roles at Pacific Gas and Electric Company. She has provided written and oral testimony before the California Public Utilities Commission. She started her career assisting businesses and outside counsel to resolve complex business and litigation challenges.
Karen holds a BA in economics from Pomona College. She is a Certified Salesforce Administrator.
Karen joined FWSF in 2014 and began serving on the board in 2017.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/karenjcrowley/
Kim Scala is an attorney with an MBA who represents privately held companies, individuals, and investors in real estate, financing, and business transactions. She serves as strategic general counsel to emerging growth and middle-market companies, as well as pro-bono counsel to Rockwood Leadership Institute. An entrepreneur with previous start-up experience, Kim left a large firm, where she was a partner, to start her own law firm, Scala Law, in 2014.
Kim was the Industry Impact Award Honorable Mention winner at the three-chapter Commercial Real Estate Women’s 2016 ELEVATE event. In 2014, she was honored as one of the “Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business” by the San Francisco Business Times and has been on the “Forever Influential Honor Roll” since 2015.
Kim has served on the FWSF board since 2015 and is currently president of the board of CREW East Bay since 2014. She is also on the Advisory Board of Alliance for Girls, which champions the leaders and voices that support young women and girls. Kim spearheaded the Archer Norris “Women in Business Roundtable” series, a moderated quarterly program featuring C-level business leaders.
Kim is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University. She received an MBA (Beta Gamma Sigma honors) from UCLA and a JD from UC Davis, where she received Order of the Coif, Law Review, and Phi Kappa Phi honors. Following law school, Kim clerked for the Honorable Justice Joseph R. Grodin of the California Supreme Court.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimscala
Sandra is a Director, Finance/Controller at BTIG, LLC a global financial services firm specializing in institutional trading, investment banking, research and related brokerage services. Given over 20 years in experience in the finance industry and in the accounting field, she is well placed to provide senior level accounting guidance and expertise.
Prior to BTIG, LLC she was the Controller of an affiliated entity, Pacific View Asset Management, LLC, and prior to that she worked at Babcock & Brown LP, a global investment and advisory firm, where she held various roles culminating in the Assistant Controller of the U.S. Corporate and Structured Finance division.
She holds an MBA with a focus in international business and a BS in finance from California State University.
Sandra served in the U.S. Army Reserve for 21 years where she was an Adjutant General branch officer. She graduated from various leadership development training courses.
Sandra has been actively involved in Financial Women of San Francisco since 2012. Her prior board roles were as Marketing and Communications Co-Chair and Scholarship Co-Chair. She was also a Financial Woman of the Year and International Women's Day committee member.
Vice President, Insurance and Benefits, Lockton
A former High School Teacher, I became an insurance broker in 2003. After successfully investing my first 9-years focusing on the California Residential Real Estate industry, with expertise in comprehensive Errors & Omissions / Professional Liability risk management and brokerage, I wanted a new challenge. So, in 2011, I left the real estate world, and shifted focus towards the Technology sector, including expanding into the world of Employee Benefits and Total Rewards.
Today, my experiences, relationships, resources, knowledge and overall perspective of the insurance, benefits, and retirement landscape have shaped my skillset into becoming a comprehensive strategic advisor and advocate for my clients’ corporate and human capital risks.
Kathleen Nielsen is the president of Equilibrium Services Group, Inc. She is a governance, compliance, risk, and HR professional with 20 years of experience working on corporate compliance matters with management and boards of national and international companies.
Kathleen works in all aspects of a company's life cycle — including start-up and formation, mergers and acquisitions, work outs, restructuring, IPO, securitization, and debt refinancing. She develops risk and corporate compliance policy for companies in a wide array of industries and works extensively with a client's shareholders, lenders, audit firms, legal counsel, and tax advisors to support the client's growth and success.
Kathleen is an experienced facilitator and trained mediator who is adept at working with teams of diverse individuals. She is also experienced in FCPA, OFAC, and ITAR compliance matters.
Kathleen has a BA, Pre-Law, from the University of California, Berkeley and an MPA from the University of San Francisco. She is certified as a Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and an SHRM Senior Certified Professional (SHRM-SCP). Kathleen is also the board chair of a non-profit providing nutrition, educational support, and tuition to impoverished children around the world.
Roi Fang, CPA, is the Controller at Brightloom, a Bay area SaaS company that builds customer growth platform. Roi is also an adjacent Accounting Processor at Golden Gate University.
Roi received her bachelor degree in Economics from UC Berkeley and Master degree in Accounting from Golden Gate University. She started her career in the Audit function at Deloitte SF. During her time at Deloitte, she specialized in SaaS and renewable energy industry. She then joined Arkose Labs, a Cybersecurity SaaS company, as the Assistant Controller.
Roi was a FWSF scholarship recipient in 2015, and has been helping out with FWSF since then. She has been a team lead for scholarship since 2015 and served on the board of FWSF on the Membership Committee and Fundraise Committee.
Denise Rigli is director in the PwC risk assurance practice in San Francisco with over 18 years of experience. Within PwC's risk assurance practice she focuses on working with financial services, fintech and technology companies to enhance their governance, risk and compliance activities. Experience covers business transformation, IT, financial reporting and operational risks, with a unique view of how these areas intersect. She has focused on assisting clients examine new perspectives, focus on identifying the most critical risk, mitigation of risk through controls that are right for their organization and ensuring that identified weaknesses are remediated timely. She has leveraged her years in the external audit practice to bring a financial statement/financial reporting perspective to both the IT and the operational side of the business for a holistic approach to risk mitigation. She is effective at building and sustaining effective and trusted relationships with senior management and is seen as a trusted business advisor.
A Strategic Recruiter on a mission - to build and power Sales, Finance and Tech teams for success
In 2004, Anne Chambers launched a consulting practice, Chambers & McAlpine Associates, Inc.,specializing in developing innovative financial technology strategies for the financial services industry. Prior to that, Anne was COO/CFO of Advisor Software, Inc., a provider of web-based asset-allocation and investment-analysis applications for financial institutions. Anne also has worked in a variety of roles at Bank of America — including SVP for Finance Change Management, where she managed major company-wide merger transitions, systems conversions, and process redesign projects. She began her career at Deloitte and Touche and has a BA and MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. Anne is active as a past president of the Haas Business School Alumni Council and a member of the Haas Business School Development Council. Anne is also a CPA.
Director of LendingDirector of Lending, Pacific Community Ventures (PCV)
Impact Lender | Startup Advisor | Former Bank Executive | Social Justice Advocate