Jillian Kowalchuk Keynote Speaker

Jillian Kowalchuk is an award-winning tech entrepreneur most well-known as the Founder & CEO of Safe & The City. Jillian was born in Canada but spent her childhood in Yemen, where her family was until escaping a civil war. Jillian was transformed by this experience and driven to find ways to improve the inequality of people’s safety worldwide. She completed her BA Psych degree, but after losing her parents at 19, she immersed herself in travel, undertaking new experiences and living abroad to find direction. She traveled to nearly a third of the world and lived in 11 countries, learning from people from all walks of life.

These early experiences nurtured Jillian’s entrepreneurial spirit by working across 30 industries to fund her endeavours while strengthening her resilience and determination. She later completed her MSc in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, operating across three continents to improve the inequalities of people living with HIV/AIDS. Her love to improve the world at scale led to her interest in technology, learning to code and creating linkages between seemingly diverse fields. When Jillian moved to the UK, this interest turned into action once she recognised the patterns of how big tech omitted safety functionality and its responsibility to help prevent incidents.

Her TEDx talk, ‘Equality By Design’, describes founding Safe & the City and her vision of the future where technology is human-centric and improves people’s right to be safe wherever they go. Jillian is a distinguished young leader, including one of only 100 women awarded the UK Home Office’s Exceptional Talent in Technology visa, the Commonwealth Businesswomen’s Network Most Inspiring Role Model, and listed as one of the UK’s Top 20 Women in Data. She is a published author of Wired Influence: Make Technology Work For You Again, a keynote speaker, and creator of the Scale Your Impact initiative.

Jillian is a sought after speaker globally from Fortune 500 companies to university campuses. She continues to inspire online and in-person audiences from North Korean entrepreneurs to women in STEM events to vulnerable teens interested in AI. Jillian speaks with an authentic vulnerability and infectious passion, which leaves audiences inspired with a new determination to take innovative action to solve meaningful problems.