White House LGBTQ Tech & Innovation Summit

Ginger Chien is a device architect at AT&T Mobility. She is responsible for defining technical requirements for mobile devices in the areas of security, protocols, location technology, critical infrastructure, and new features, and she helps guide the integration of these evolving technologies into new devices. From 2012 to 2016 she presented technical sessions at the AT&T Developer Summit in Las Vegas in which she shared upcoming smartphone and internet-of-things technologies, wireless developments, and new architecture concepts. She has also worked on other technologies at AT&T dating all the way back to modems and traditional pagers. Prior to that she taught college-level electrical engineering and signal processing courses to working adults seeking new career opportunities in engineering, and was a software and simulation engineer applying modeling and simulation technology to problems as diverse as underground tunneling and commercial airplane manufacturing.

Ginger has an M.S. degree from Princeton University and a B.S. from the University of Washington, both in electrical engineering with an emphasis on communications theory and signal processing. She spends a lot of time these days musing about social implications of technology, the pace of technology change having passed the inflection point of generational comprehension, and the reintegration of traditional collaborative communications and social purpose into a prevailing culture of competition and scarcity. She has also created and marketed a magnetic toy that sits on many science teachers’ desks, engineered an articulated mechanism in a package the size of a tennis ball that fans real peacock feathers for a costume, and is an inventor on 37 technology and business process patents.

She currently volunteers for LEAGUE (the AT&T LGBTQ employee resource group) and PFLAG, and is the president of a local Toastmasters chapter. As an independent speaker, as part of panels, and as an AT&T representative she frequently speaks to corporations, senior citizen groups, schools, and churches on diversity and inclusion best-practices, presents self-development and self-awareness workshops that help uncover internally and externally directed cognitive bias, and shares her own transgender experience. She finds much of her personal joy speaking on personal growth topics, sharing tales of life at open microphone storytelling nights, and watching a certain rural Washington town light up year after year when her transgender rock band [http://thenastyhabits.com] comes to play.