ESTABLISHED ALUMNI: SECRETS TO SUCCESS

Gillian Smith

Artsci’96 (Sociology)

Managing Partner, NATIONAL Public Relations

Gillian Smith was appointed as managing partner of NATIONAL’s Toronto office in October 2020. Gillian has more than 20 years of experience in public relations and strategic communications. Over the course of her career, she has held senior positions with multiple organizations in the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors including RBC, Aeroplan, the Toronto Region Board of Trade and the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. Before joining NATIONAL, she was working at her own consulting agency, acting as a senior advisor with a portfolio of C-suite and Board clients across multiple industries, including healthcare, technology, financial services and energy. Gillian Smith serves as a board director with the Ontario Science Centre, TO Live, Toronto Arts Foundation, Business and the Arts, the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund and The Walrus Foundation. She also ran for the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario in the 2018 provincial election.

Raif Barbaros

Artsci’97 (math, statistics, computing & information science)

CTO, BFS Capital

Most of his career has been as founder or CTO of venture-backed startups in the Bay area, and Toronto, three of which were acquired and two reached millions of users. He is a seven-time startup CTO, currently at BFS Capital, where their mission is to leverage advanced technology and data science to unlock exciting new financial products and services for underserved small businesses. Today, they provide working capital to customers in the US, Canada, and the UK. But stay tuned ... there is more to come. They are building a revolutionary product that will prove essential for small businesses to recover and resurge in the post-COVID economy. 

Prior to that, Raif led the product, design, engineering, and customer success teams at Influitive, a late-stage B2B SaaS company whose customers include 8 of the world's 10 largest software companies.

Before Influitive, Raif was part of the founding team at Loblaw Digital - the team responsible for digital and e-commerce at Canada's largest retailer. He led engineering, data science, QA, and support and built a team of 150 from the ground up. We grew the eCommerce business from zero to nine figures in four years by launching four distinct eCommerce and customer engagement platforms. Raif also had a tenure at a seed-stage VC firm in San Francisco, where he cut his teeth on the startup business and he spent three very formative years at Deloitte as a management consultant. Raif has an MBA from UC Berkeley, a B.Sc.H. in Computer Science, and a B.Sc in Mathematics from Queen's University. 

Jasmine Tehara

Artsci’01 (Political studies & applied economics)

Vice-President, Business Opitmization & Finance Transforatmion, Manulife

Jasmine Tehara is currently the Vice President Business Optimization & Retirement Transformation at Manulife in the Global Wealth & Asset Management (GWAM) business. She has led the business readiness function on the largest transformation Manulife has undertaken, led a finance transformation, and built the digitization and automation capability for the business. She has a passion for understanding how technology, people, and a digital labour force impact organizations.

Prior to joining Manulife in 2016, Jasmine held progressively senior roles at TD in Canada and the US, spanning Personal Banking, Wealth, Asset Management, and Human Resources.  Throughout her 18 years at TD, she led a North American Shared Service transformation, built a Centre of Excellence for continuous improvement, led the acquisition of an asset management firm, and delivered large scale people and technology initiatives. 

Jasmine is actively involved in the community, currently as a Board member at William Osler Health System and Chair of the Governance committee. Prior to that, she served for nine years on the Board of Directors at WoodGreen Community Services, one of Toronto’s largest not-for-profit organizations, with four years as Board Chair.

Sam Molyneux

artsci’06 (biochemistry)

Co-CEO & Co-Founder, Poppy Health

Sam is an experienced entrepreneur and scientist specializing in bringing mission-driven, science-forward ventures to market. He is Co-Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder of Poppy Health, an institutional venture-backed technology company located in San Francisco and Toronto.

He was previously CEO & co-founded Meta, an artificial intelligence company focused on scientific knowledge. In 2017 Meta was acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to make its technologies and tools freely available for researchers around the world.

Sam has received several honours for his work in both scientific research and in business, and most recently was awarded Canada's Top 40 Under 40. Sam was named #20 on Fast Company Magazine's 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2017. In 2016, he won the Martin Walmsley Fellowship Award and previously the Banting & Best Doctoral Fellowship.

Meta was recognized as one of the Top 10 Innovations of 2014 by The Scientist Magazine, and has been written about in MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch, The Economist, Fortune, ReCode, Engadget, Wired, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, NewsWeek, and Communications of the ACM among others. Meta's acquisition by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was covered in more than 160 news and magazine outlets.

Sam's research has been published in Nature Genetics, Nature Cell Biology, Science Translational Medicine, Cancer Cell, PNAS, and JCI, among others. He is a frequent speaker on scientific information and technology for good, and for three years running, on AI for Good at the United Nations.

Jamie Anderson

MA’98 (Economics)

Head of US Trading, Insight Investment

Jamie joined Insight in January 2015 as Head of US Trading, with experience in the trading of cash, derivatives, futures and options. Prior to Insight, he spent six years at Bank of New York Mellon where he was a managing director principally focused on interest rate derivative trading and later served as Head of Global USD Rates Trading. Jamie has also held a derivatives trading position at Countrywide Financial and started his career in 2000 as a derivatives trader at Wells Fargo. Jamie holds a BArtsSc in Economics from McMaster University, Ontario, Canada and an MA in Economics from Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada. As well as holding a Series 7 license from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), Jamie is also a CFA charterholder.