Dr. Nashlie Sephus

Dr. Nashlie Sephus is the Tech Evangelist for Amazon AI focusing on fairness and identifying biases at AWS AI. She formerly led the Amazon Visual Search team as an Applied Scientist in Atlanta, which launched visual search for replacement parts on the Amazon Shopping app in June 2018. This technology was a result of former startup Partpic (Atlanta) being acquired by Amazon, for which she was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Prior to working at Partpic, she received her Ph.D. from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2014 and worked for a year with Exponent technical consulting firm in New York City. Her core research areas were digital signal processing, machine learning and computer engineering. She received her B.S. in Computer Engineering from Mississippi State University (2007), where she currently sits on the Dean’s Advisory Council for the Bagley College of Engineering and the Advisory Board for the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Dr. Sephus is a native of Jackson, Mississippi and a 2003 graduate of Murrah High School/Power Academic and Performing Arts Complex (APAC). She’s had several internships and research experiences worldwide with companies such as IBM, Delphi, University of California at Berkeley, GE Research Center, GE Energy, Miller Transporters and Kwangwoon University in Seoul, South Korea. Recently, Dr. Sephus became founder and CEO of The Bean Path, a non-profit organization based in Jackson, MS, to sow technical expertise and bridge the tech gap in communities by hosting free tech office hours in local libraries, conducting youth coding workshops and giving away grants. She is also developing 12 acres of land in the downtown area deemed the Jackson Tech District for strengthening a community amongst the next generation of technologists.

Dr. Sephus has been featured in AJC, CBS kids' show Mission Unstoppable, Black Enterprise, Ebony, Amazon Science, AWS re:Invent, Afrotech and Your First Million podcast, along with several others. She also serves on several startup and academic advisory boards along with mentoring others and investing in Atlanta-based startups. During her leisure time, she enjoys playing tennis, playing the piano, listening to music, bargain hunting, biking and working on do-it-yourself (DIY) projects at home.

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