Kathy Hurley

Kathy Hurley is a former senior executive for numerous educational publishing and technology companies, including IBM and Pearson. After retiring from Pearson, she was selected as a Fellow of the Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI) at Harvard University and co-founded a global nonprofit organization, Girls Thinking Global (girlsthinkingglobal.org). In 2004, Hurley was inducted into the Association of Educational Publishers’ Hall of Fame and in 2019, she received the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award in Education Technology from the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA). Currently, Hurley is a senior advisor to several educational technology companies, education associations, and school superintendent networks. She is also the co-editor, with Priscilla Shumway, of Real Women, Real Leaders: Surviving and Succeeding in the Business World (Wiley). Kathy has received the following esteemed awards: • The Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents at its 19th Annual National Education Summit in October in San Juan, Puerto Rico • The 2022 Distinctive Mentor Award from the Education Research and Development Institute on July 18 in Baltimore, MD • The NCTET (National Coalition for Technology in Education & Training) Founders Award at their annual gala in May • The Rock Star Award at the RTM School Congress in San Diego on Dec. 6 Kathy and her co-author, Barbara Kurshan, have also been selected to present “Why Women are Rising to the Top in Education,” which will focus on the findings detailed in InnovateHERs, at SXSW EDU 2023 in Austin, TX in March 2023.