Special Event: Google’s Emily Ma talks with Dana Gunders

Dana Gunders serves as ReFED’s Executive Director. Dana is a national expert on food waste and one of the first to bring to light just how much food is lost throughout the food system. For almost a decade, she was a Senior Scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). She then launched Next Course, LLC to strategically advise on the topic. Some of her career highlights include authoring the landmark  Wasted report and Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook, launching the Save the Food campaign with the Ad Council, testifying in Congress, consulting to Google, appearing on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and being a founding Board Member of ReFED.

Emily Ma leads a cross-functional team at Google with the mission of organizing the world’s food information in service of building a future food system that is sustainable, nourishing and equitable for all. Her work on food systems started at X (opens in a new tab), Alphabet’s moonshot factory. There, she led a number of early stage moonshots before working on food systems moonshots inspired by the Google Food team, focusing on reducing food waste and food insecurity and increasing data openness (opens in a new tab) in the food system. 

Prior, Emily helped bring a range of breakthrough technologies into the world including Loon internet balloons (opens in a new tab) and Glass smart glasses (opens in a new tab). Emily started her career as a mechanical engineer at IDEO, a global design and innovation consultancy, during which she came to embrace the equal importance of human-centered design, engineering and business. With this, she returned to Stanford University to pursue her MBA and continues to actively teach entrepreneurship at the School of Engineering. She is the holder of seven patents spanning medical devices to consumer electronics.

Emily is also a Member of ReFED's Board of Directors.