Leavey School of Business Dean’s Executive Faculty, Public Board Director, Board Director at Nasdaq U.S. Exchanges
Anita Lynch is dedicated to making life better and business more resilient through technology and data. Her expertise includes implementing digital transformation, finding positive solutions that benefit all stakeholders to mitigate risk, and increasing shareholder value.
Ms. Lynch is an adjunct lecturer at Santa Clara University with the Leavey School of Business for Management & Entrepreneurship. Her expertise covers a variety of topics including Digital Strategy, Risk Management, Data Governance, and AI for Business Managers.
Anita currently serves on the board of Nasdaq U.S. Exchanges, which include The Nasdaq Stock Market, Nasdaq PHLX, Nasdaq BX, Nasdaq ISE, Nasdaq MRX, and Nasdaq GEMX. The exchanges are private subsidiaries of Nasdaq (Nasdaq: NDAQ), a global technology company serving the capital markets and other industries with a diverse offering in software and data.
Anita also serves on private company boards: Hungryroot (an AI powered grocery shopping and meal delivery B2C service), Infogain (a privately held digital platform, software engineering & consulting company) and Data.world (an Gen AI + knowledge graph based data catalog and governance platform).
Anita is an experienced executive leader, corporate board member and advisor to venture capital portfolio companies. Most recently she served as Chief Data Officer at New Relic (NASDAQ: NEWR), a provider of data-driven enterprise software. She is among the first African American women to serve in the c-suite in this role for a public company.
Prior to New Relic, Anita was Vice President of Data Governance, Architecture, and Analytics at Disney. With a data strategy lens, she helped to align vision, priorities, and financial goals for the launch of Disney+ in the Americas, Europe and APAC regions scaling to 100M+ subscribers.
Previously, Anita’s career traversed some of America’s most high-profile technology brands leading business operations and technology teams in retail, media and finance sectors. She served as leader of Business Intelligence & Analytics for the launch of Amazon Prime Now, as Director of Analytics for Yahoo homepage and verticals, and drove business expansion partnerships for Apple iTunes. She also led strategy and management consulting projects at Bain & Company after her career began in software engineering for technology startups.
Recognition and speaking engagements include: the San Francisco Business Times “Top 100 Most Influential Women in Business”; one of the “Top 8 Female Analytics Experts” in Forbes. In 2022, she received the Culture Shift Award for Technology, Innovation and Social Impact in Silicon Valley. She was a featured keynote speaker in Snowflake’s 2020 Data Cloud Summit. Ms. Lynch holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School, a BS in Economics from Northwestern University, and two patents for her work on trading system algorithms at the Chicago Board of Trade.