Jury Alumni

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  Rhys Newman

  Global Head of Design & User Experience, ABB E-Mobility

  2024 Robotics Jury Member

  Rhys is the Global Head of Design & User Experience at ABB E_Mobility. He previously worked as a consultant and led multi-disciplinary Design teams at Google X's Everyday Robots, Casper Sleep, NOKIA, and Lego. He co-founded his entrepreneurial venture, OMATA in 2015.
  As a Design Leader, he has a reputation for building happy and motivated studios where designers want to work, creativity is the priority, and innovation happens. He is obsessed with nurturing cultures of creativity, optimism, and the value of Design and Designing as a perspective and a practice.
  Rhys has a Master’s Degree in Product Design from the Royal College of Art in London, and a First Class Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of Wales, Cardiff, UK. He has been a part-time lecturer at Art Centre, Pasadena; Goldsmiths University, London; Denmark Design School, Copenhagen; and the Royal College of Art, London. He has also served on the jury of numerous competitions, was Chair of the IDSA IDEA Awards, and has multiple patents.

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  Helen Maria Nugent

  Dean of Design, California College of the Arts (CCA)

  2023 Robotics Jury Member

  Helen Maria Nugent has been leading progressive innovation in art and design education for over 25 years. Currently, she is the Dean of Design at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco where she oversees 9 graduate and undergraduate design programs including an MBA in Design Strategy. She envisions the Design Division at CCA as a sanctuary for those with radical curiosity, where wonder and imagination are amplified through rigor and craft.
  Previously she was a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she founded the Designed Objects programs that cultivate a reciprocal relationship between products and humanity. In the way-back machine, she was the co-director of the transformative and aptly named, Workshop for Art Research and Practice (WARP), a radical foundation program for artists and designers at the University of Florida.
  
  Helen Maria is also the co-founder of Haelo Design, an interdisciplinary research-oriented design studio that is undertaking the transition from object design to strategic futuring.
  

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  Afshin Mehin

  Chief Creative Officer, Card79

  2024 Robotics Jury Captain

  Afshin Mehin is the founder of Card79, a creative studio based in San Francisco. The studio focuses on tackling complex and future-facing projects, working on everything from Brain Computer Interfaces to Autonomous Vehicles for agile Startups like Postmates as well as large companies like Amazon and Lululemon. Afshin’s experience blends the old and new, having worked for traditional furniture designers like BarberOsgerby and Terence Conran as well as futuristics institutions such as M.I.T. 's Media Lab Europe and Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

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  Kendra Byrne

  Group Product Manager, Google DeepMind

  2024 Robotics Jury Member

  Kendra is a Group Product Manager at Google DeepMind where she leads product innovation for new research products. For the last 5 years, Kendra has worked with teams to ground research in user-centered needs and help bring new technologies to life.
  
  Before joining Google DeepMind, Kendra held product leadership positions at X the Moonshot Factory, Bot & Dolly, and Formant. At X, she co-founded the project that graduated as Intrinsic, a robotics software and AI company at Alphabet. At Bot & Dolly, Kendra was responsible for developing easy to use interfaces for robotics in cinematography and visual eects.

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  Stuart Harvey Lee

  Founder, Prime Studio

  2023 Robotics Jury Captain

  Stuart Harvey Lee is the Founder of Prime Studio, a Product + Brand design consultancy based in NYC. He started his career as a Mechanical Engineer working in a steelworks before discovering his passion for Industrial Design whilst earning his Master's Degree at the Royal College of Art.
  
  He moved to New York in 1991 and cut his teeth working at both Smart Design and Able Design before founding Prime Studio in 1998. At Prime, Stuart is fortunate to work with a wide range of clients from global companies like Unilever and Bayer to startups like Harry’s and Welly. Most importantly he relishes designing products that make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.
  
  When he’s not designing Stuart can either be found challenging himself to ride the hills of the Hudson Valley on his favorite bike or desperately trying to cultivate his asparagus bed.
  

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  Joshua Taylor

  CEO, Product EVO

  2023 Robotics Jury Member

  Josh Taylor is the CEO of Product EVO, a surfer dude, and a secret weapon for overwhelmed founders and product managers. He believes passion without good strategy is wasted energy. So he's on a mission to make successful products predictable and repeatable. His approach is to align the product development process with first principles for demand generation.
  
  Through Product EVO, Josh has helped develop hundreds of products and solved countless product development challenges along the way. He's created a curriculum for lean market research and product strategy for high-growth companies with limited time and resources.
  
  Outside of Product EVO, Josh is a landlocked surfer. He moves abroad with his family in the summers to chase waves during the big wave season in Central America. He is always looking for ways to expand his thinking about what is possible for his life and take massive action to live that way.
  

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  Anthony Prats

  Product Lead, Robotics & Automation, Stealth Startup

  2024 Robotics Jury Member

  From creating lovable robot sidekicks to defining the future of food, Anthony Prats is a product and design leader with a decade of experience building category-defining hardware and software products. He got his start at Anki, helping to bring their Cozmo robot to life, built a molecular beverage printer at Cana, and explored the future of human-robot interaction at Google. He currently leads robotics and automation efforts at a stealth startup in the food space.

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  Dan Formosa

  Founder, ThinkActHuman

  2023 Robotics Jury Member

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  Pepin Gelardi

  Co-Founder, Tomorrow Lab

  2023 Robotics Jury Member

  Pepin Gelardi works at the intersection of purpose and possibility, exploring the role of entrepreneurship and technology in solving future-facing problems. He has cultivated a skill set deep in idea development, user insights, concept visualization, form development, hardware prototyping, mechanism design and manufacturing.
  As a teenager, Pepin developed products for his family’s injection molding business. He holds a BSME from Columbia University, New York, and a Post-Baccalaureate Diploma in Industrial Design from Scuola Politecnica di Design, Milan, Italy.
  
  He Co-founded Tomorrow Lab® in 2010 and leads the Industrial Design and Mechanical Engineering teams to invent and develop new, impactful hardware products. Prior to Tomorrow Lab®, he developed new CPG ideas, products, and brands at Fahrenheit 212 and Procter & Gamble.
  
  After hours, Pepin teaches workshops in design, creates costumes and toys with his twin children, and creates site-specific art with his wife Teresa.