Alia Poonawala is the executive director for Hire Hopkins, an innovation office out of Johns Hopkins University, whose purpose is guaranteeing highly satisfactory employment offers for all graduates regardless of background or social capital. Through Hire Hopkins, Poonawala focuses on helping companies get access to the best talent through hiring partnerships focused on equitable hiring pipelines.

Poonawala has been featured in publications like Inc. magazine and was named one of 2019’s Power Leaders in Technology by the South Florida Business Journal. She’s delivered talks at organizations like Babson College, the National Center for Women in Technology, and Girls Who Code and holds an interdisciplinary BSA from Carnegie Mellon University.

She is a passionate business leader, start-up mentor, and speaker. Poonawala previously served as a general manager at Ironhack. Under her leadership, she supported Ironhack’s 10X growth and built diversity-focused tech education partnerships with companies like Facebook and Uber. Before, she led sales and marketing at an EdTech start-up and coached senior executives at Santander, AMEC, and Walmart.