Oct 15 2026

Bold Leadership Download: Women in Engineering – Leadership & Career Paths

4:00 pm – 5:00 pm

In Person

The Bold Leadership Download series features inspiring leaders of industry who share their pathway to success with UT students, faculty and alumni.

Join us for a Women in Leadership and Engineering panel hosted by the Women in Engineering program and the Cockrell School of Engineering.

This event features a keynote panel from Texas Engineering alumni and friends, Carrie Colbert, Kathy Papermaster, and Shanaz Hemmati, moderated by Emily Doran.

Cost:

FREE

Location:

Mulva Auditorium (EER 0.904)

Join us for a Women in Leadership and Engineering panel hosted by the Women in Engineering program and the Cockrell School of Engineering. This event features a keynote panel from Cockrell alumni and friends, Carrie Colbert, Shanaz Hemmati and Kathy Papermaster, moderated by Emily Doran.

RSVP

About the Speakers

Carrie Colbert is a Cockrell and McCombs School of Business alumnus and the Founding and General Partner of Curate Capital, a venture capital firm she established in 2020 with a clear mission: invest in women creating what they wish existed. Before founding Curate, Carrie spent nearly two decades in the energy industry, primarily at Hilcorp Energy, where she held leadership roles spanning engineering and finance. During her tenure, the company evolved into one of the largest privately held upstream oil and gas companies in the United States, growing to billions in enterprise value. That experience shaped Carrie’s entrepreneurial mindset and gave her firsthand exposure to scaling businesses, creating enterprise value, and creating long-term wealth through ownership. Since launching Curate, Carrie has raised nearly $40 million to invest in female-founded consumer companies across sectors, including beauty, fashion, food and beverage, home and lifestyle. Curate’s portfolio includes brands such as Live Tinted, Nori and Frances Valentine.

Shanaz Hemmati is a Cockrell alumnus and the Co-Founder & Executive Advisor at ZenBusiness, a digital business management platform that provides budding entrepreneurs with a complete set of services to simplify the process of starting, managing, and growing their business. The company has become one of Austin’s most successful entrepreneurial ventures. Throughout her career, Hemmati has worked to create a positive social impact. She is passionate about and renowned for accelerating business growth through technology and identifying and nurturing talent. She also stays active with different companies as a board member or advisor and enjoys mentoring. Her leadership earned her the distinguished engineering graduate award from Cockrell School of Engineering in 2025, a placement on Inc.’s Female Founders List for 2025, the Silver Stevie® Award for Female Executive of the Year in 2024 and the “Entrepreneurial Vision” award at the 2023 Greater Austin Business Awards.

Kathy Papermaster is a retired engineering executive who spent 26 years at IBM in research and development leadership roles. Her career highlight was serving as director of the Sony/Toshiba/IBM Design Center in Austin, where she led the final three years of the Cell microprocessor program, the chip that powered the PlayStation 3. Leading a multinational team taught her as much about communication across cultures as about chip design. Earlier in her career, she led chip integration on PowerPC processors used in Apple computers and championed new design automation tools as an early adopter. Papermaster holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota and an M.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Vermont.