About

Executive Team

Paschal Iwuh, PhD

President & Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Iwuh is a TAN co-Founder and served as TAN’s Director of Public Relations and Communication till April 2006. He was a co-chair of TAN's inaugural conference, TANCon, held in 2006. He led the Sponsorship & Affiliation Committee until he became the President and Chief Executive Officer in January, 2008. In collaboration with a TAN Advisory Board member, Dr. Frank Greene, he developed the Leadership Economic Development Program for sub-Saharan African countries.

Dr. Iwuh has worked as an engineer and engineering consultant in the Biotech and Bio-Pharmaceutical industries and consulting firms since 1999. He is currently a Validation Engineering Subject Matter Expert (SME) with Regulatory Compliance Associates, a bio-Pharmaceutical Consulting firm. He sits on the Board of corporations and non-profit organizations.

Dr. Iwuh has a PhD in Business Organization & Management from Capella University, Minneapolis, MN; a Master of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from the Technical University of Budapest, Hungary; a Bachelor of Science degree in Petroleum Engineering (first in his class) from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria and a Business Administration Certificate (with Distinction) from University of California, Berkeley.

Gordon Williams

Co-Founder and Board Member

As a founding board member of the African Network, Mr. Williams plays an integral part in the planning and strategic thinking for the future of the TAN Organization. In 2010, Williams will provide support and direction to the TANCon Chair and team to execute a successful TANCon conference as well as represent TANCon at a board level.

TANCon 2010 is the flagship event of TAN and as such requires the cumulative knowledge and experience gained from previous conferences to be shared with the TANCon team.

Williams Co-Chaired the first ever TANCon conference in 2006 and has since led finance committees for TANCon conferences. All conferences have either broken even or turned a small surplus.

Gordon Williams has also served in conference committees involved in planning past conferences. Past roles include:

VP and CFO to 2009, He also oversaw financial reports, financial control and risk management;
Operations Director, 2005-2006; and
Board Member 2004-Present.

Outside of The African Network, Gordon works within the finance organization of a large computer systems company in the Silicon Valley where he is responsible for Forecasting Systems and Processes. He is also responsible for the performance metrics that measure the process efficiency and effectiveness.

A 10 year veteran, Williams has held several roles, partnering with Marketing; developing and delivering productivity enhancing tools for the Sales force as part of the Worldwide Sales Productivity group; and working in the UK offices of his current same company as a Finance Manager in the Inside Sales Function.

Prior roles include a two year stint as a Financial Analyst in the UK for an international IT research company and three year trainee Accountant role with a firm of chartered accountants.

Gordon Williams holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.

Sade Sobande

Director, Media and Public Relations

As TANCon 2007 chair she was responsible for ensuring the success of the conference by managing and leveraging people, time and monetary resources. Ms. Sobande is a manufacturing engineer in the Manufacturing Technology and Quality (TnQ) group at Cisco Systems Inc. She is also one of the co-founders of Nirvana Catering Services, a catering company focused on providing the best of African foods for all types of events. She is a member of the TANCon 2008 Discovery Committee.

Ms. Sobande holds a Bachelors degree in Industrial Engineering and a Masters degree in Quality Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Hazel Gachoka

Director of Membership

Hazel Gachoka currently holds the position of Network Consulting Engineer at Cisco Systems with responsibility for performing analysis and diagnosis on complex networking problems as well as creating new advanced services for Cisco.

Prior to Cisco, Ms Gachoka worked as a Network Engineer at MCI Worldcom and, Software Developer/Programmer at Liz Claiborne. Ms. Gachoka also possesses a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Jersey City University and a Master of Science in Telecommunication Management from Steven's Institute of Technology. Ms. Gachoka has received the highest Cisco certification, Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert # 6496.

Luc Tengueu

Chief Operating Officer (COO)

Luc Tengueu is a Senior Software Engineer at Cisco Systems in San Jose, California. He joined the company in 2000 after earning a dual Masters Degree from Polytechnic di Torino, Italy and University of Illinois Chicago. He is the holder of several patents in the field of IP technologies and received several awards for his contribution to the success of the 6500/7600 product lines at Cisco Systems.

Luc Tengueu is also a savvy Entrepreneur. He co-founded two African business clubs in the Silicon Valley with a focus on empowering people of African descent and giving back to the continent. As a social Entrepreneur, he co-founded the Silicon Circle in the late 2007 with the goal to help African Universities in the field of research. By Mid April of 2008, the Silicon Circle will be donating 200 computers to Universities in Cameroon. Luc Tengueu also highly contributed to the success of TANcon 2007 by being part of the speaker and Marketing committee.

Luc is well travelled and has lived in three continents. He is fluent in French, Italian and English. On his spare time, he enjoys discovering new cuisine and is a multi time wine testing contest winner.

Biniam Woldemariam

Chair, TANCon2010

Biniam started his career as an engineer in the flash memory design group at Advanced Micro Device Corporation (AMD) which was later spun off to become Spansion Inc. From there, he departed to join a chip design startup firm focused on designing low power computer processors. The firm was later acquired by a prominent Silicon Valley consumer electronics design and manufacturing corporation where he currently holds a CAD engineering position.

Biniam has been involved with The African Network since he became a member in 2008. In 2009, as a member of the TANCon marketing committee, he played an active role in TAN conferences: TANCon USA and TANCon Africa, Sierra Leone.

Biniam holds a Bachelors of Science degree in electrical engineering and computer science from The University of California at Berkeley. He enjoys traveling and music as well as reading technical investment analysis.

Marie Ange Eyoum, PhD

TANCon USA 2009 Chair

Dr. Marie-Ange Eyoum is a product marketing engineer at Intel Corporation. In this role, she is in charge of Atom processor for netbooks activities ranging from engineering & customer marketing interface, sustaining current netbook skus on-and-off roadmap offerings, managing samples schedule / roll-out, OEMs and field communications, ecosystem training on product.

Prior to her current position, Dr. Eyoum was the technical assistant to Intel Chairman Chief of Staff in the Executive Office / World Ahead Program that aims to bring uncompromised technologies to emerging markets. She also worked as a device engineer in state-of-art memory devices and as a technical analyst at Intel Capital developing investment strategies in the areas of Business Intelligence and Search.

Outside of work, Dr. Eyoum is actively involved in the community to promote education, mentorship and technology within various non-profit organizations. She is the board of WIN (Women at Intel Network) as the outreach coordinator. She has worked closely with Sally Ride/NASA, Techbridge and Girls for Change organizations in different outreach events, mentorship, training and coaching activities to encourage minorities and women to excel in science and engineering related fields. Dr. Eyoum recently joined the advisory board of Akili Dada, to help promote girls' education in Kenya through scholarships and mentorship.

With rep organization, which goal is to repurposing business to transform societies, Dr. Eyoum has been providing training and consultancy services to start-up companies in developing nations to help repurpose their business to address major societal issues such as poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, social justice. In Spring 2007, she travelled to Chennai-India with rep to consult with Infodrach Inc., a company that provides hardware services to large corporations within Chennai and its vicinities and was able to provide new strategies, actions items and KPI (Key Performance Indicators) to her client (the founder/CEO of Infodrach) to help him expand his business, thus create new jobs to many unemployed Chennai residents. She is very involved into training the local teams as they travel with rep, in developing scorecarding matrix for their clients based on 10P model.

With TAN (The African Network), an organization that endeavors to cultivate an ecosystem which empowers African entrepreneurs and showcases Africa's potential as a major emerging market, Dr. Eyoum was the Chair of TanCon08 Finance Committee. In this role, she was involved in managing fund-raising and finance activities or the conference.

Dr. Eyoum holds a Bachelor in Mathematics and a Master & PhD in electrical Engineering from University of California-Berkeley with research expertise on the integration of MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) with CMOS electronics. She is fluent in both English and French, and enjoys cooking, outdoor activities such as hiking, climbing, running marathons or swimming, reading, Bible-study, playing guitar, travelling on mission trips, giving back to the community and hanging-out with friends and families. She is also very involved in her church at Abundant Life Christian Fellowship where she holds leadership positions within the Young Adults & Prayer Ministry.