Bruin Success

Nicole Starr '01 is Vice President of Social Impact for Participant, the leading media company dedicated to entertainment that inspires audiences to engage in positive social change.

In her role, Nicole oversees the development and execution of impact campaigns that bring together art and activism to accelerate progress around the world’s most pressing issues. Her passion for leveraging the power of storytelling to inspire action drives her work at Participant, which includes the creation of social impact and culture change campaigns for numerous films, such as the critically acclaimed Judas and the Black Messiah, RBG, On the Basis of Sex, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power and Academy Award®-winning Roma. Most recently, the impact campaign around Roma helped shift the narrative around domestic workers and inspired the cultural conditions for policy change in the U.S. and Mexico.

Nicole came to Participant with over a decade of experience in the entertainment industry, including a six-year stint at 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment building corporate partnerships around film and TV properties such as Avatar, Life of Pi, X-men franchise, and Glee. In addition, Nicole is a founding member of Storyline Partners, an organization working in writers’ rooms to create authentic portrayals of underrepresented or misrepresented communities in pop culture.

Follow Participant on Instagram and keep an eye on their job board here.

Bruin Success is hosted and produced by Christian Chavez '13.

Jamal Madni, M.S. '08, '12 is Co-Founder & CEO of Ingage, a company intersecting artificial intelligence and human connection by developing a behavioral signal analytics videoconferencing platform to help individuals better read and react to the virtual boardroom, exam room and classroom. Before technology entrepreneurship, Jamal was Managing Director of Enterprise Technology Strategy for Boeing. In this capacity, he spearheaded the $100B company’s integrated research & development road mapping, internal boutique technology assessments and technical due diligence for corporate M&As. Prior roles at Boeing included program managing the RF integrated electronics payload suite for NISAR, which is the world’s most expensive Earth-imaging satellite. Furthermore, as a Boeing software engineer, Jamal architected and developed a machine learning system for “spacecraft disease diagnosis,” which was a variant of his thesis work in wireless health at UCLA.

For these efforts, Jamal has been nationally and internationally recognized by organizations such as the Ellis Island Honor Society, IEEE, SAE, SSPI, IET, and The Engineers’ Council. Passionate about organizational culture, Jamal founded the da Vinci Summit, named North America’s Employee Engagement Project of the Year in 2017. Finally, as a social entrepreneur, Jamal created a college application preparatory program, which has sent over 50 first-generation, low-income, underrepresented minority students to pursue STEM-based higher education. In addition to his double masters at UCLA, Jamal graduated with his master’s degree in management from Stanford Graduate School of Business as a Robert Joss Scholar.

Bruin Success is hosted and produced by Christian Chavez '13.

Liz Schneider '14 works on Google's real estate sustainability team, where she is currently the team's first-ever data manager. She helped create this role last year when it became clear that Google's ambitious new sustainability goals would require an unprecedented level of thoughtfulness around data management. In this new role, she's guiding the development of data systems that provide insight into all aspects of real estate sustainability, from renewable energy to water efficiency and waste tracking.

Prior to Google, she spent five years as a sustainability consultant, working with federal agencies and Fortune 500 companies to develop and implement strategies for sustainability and climate resilience. When Liz isn't working, she can usually be found outside, climbing rocks and enjoying the Southern California sunshine.

Bruin Success is hosted and produced by Christian Chavez '13.

Anthony Martore '16 is a Manager on the Business Diversity & Inclusion team at NIKE. In his current role, he leads an enterprise-wide initiative to expand NIKE's economic investment into diverse communities and diverse-owned businesses through the implementation of NIKE's first-ever global Supplier Diversity Program. Anthony hails from San Francisco, CA and is a first-generation American. He greatly enjoys international travel, and has visited over 40 countries to-date to continue his pursuit of learning from cultures, backgrounds and walks of life that vary from his own.

Bruin Success is hosted and produced by Christian Chavez '13.

Kate Pflueger ’11 is Manager of Asset Optimization Strategy at Netflix. After graduating in 2011 with a BA in Communications, Kate launched her career at Paramount Pictures in their Worldwide Marketing Partnerships group. In 2015, Kate began a new chapter of her career as a producer for Netflix where she worked with both international and domestic studios, as well as filmmakers to develop and optimize the imagery representing their content on the Netflix platform. She now leads a team focused on providing data-driven creative insights to producers, designers, and editors responsible for creating the rich visual promotional experience on the streaming platform.

Bruin Success is hosted and produced by Christian Chavez '13.

Brandon Dang '16 is responsible for user acquisition at Headspace - an app for meditation, mindfulness and mental health. He graduated UCLA in 2016 as an Economics major unsure of what career path he wanted to pursue. Digital marketing was a field that presented itself after he pursued an interest in tech and media. Brandon's young career has been a non-linear path that has always been inspired by a restlessness to continue exploring and learning.

Bruin Success is hosted and produced by Christian Chavez '13.

Sei Ishikawa '05 began his career in the global mobility industry over 15 years ago. After graduating from UCLA with double majors in Political Science and International Development Studies in 2005, he started his career as a US immigration specialist at an immigration law firm in Los Angeles, CA. While working at the firm, he developed a passion for HR, which led him to pursue an MBA in Strategic HR. He managed a full suite of People functions while working in wholesale in Los Angeles. Sei then relocated to New York in 2014 to join the mobility group at Fast Retailing, a public Japanese retail holding company for brands such as Uniqlo, Theory, and Hemut Lang. In 2016, he joined WeWork as Director of Global Mobility. During his first year, he created the global mobility policies and processes from scratch, aiding the company in its global expansion efforts. In 2020, he took on additional responsibilities to serve as a point of contact for all HR matters related to divestiture and franchise deals.

Bruin Success is hosted and produced by Christian Chavez '13.

When someone says “career,” you probably think of the classic ones like Doctor, Lawyer or Teacher, right? It makes sense yet so many career choices exist beyond the ones we may think of first.

Over the next 10 episodes, Bruin Success will be featuring UCLA alumni who are paving their way in careers you probably haven’t heard of. If you are familiar with the careers, you’ll be getting an even closer look at the roles and experiences to help demystify each field and industry.

We have a great lineup of alumni so subscribe to the podcast, connect with us on social media and help us get the word out as we explore 10 Careers You’ve Never Heard Of.

Bruin Success is hosted by Christian Chavez ’13, Associate Director for UCLA Alumni Career Engagement. In his role, Christian leads programs and initiatives that support the career and professional development needs of UCLA alumni and current students. In addition to managing his portfolio of programs and resources offered by the UCLA Alumni Association, he works with multiple campus partners at UCLA to bring professional development opportunities to UCLA communities on and off-campus.

The Alumni Career Engagement team provides resources, opportunities and events for Bruins at all stages of their careers through the help of faculty, staff, alumni, employers, and the UCLA community.