Mentors

Cindy Vaquero mentored Thursday and helped with Monday sessions of NGCC. She recently graduated from Mount Saint Mary College. She is a First-Gen in her family with a Bachelors in Information Technology Concentrated in Education. She graduated from Newburgh P-TECH Program in 2018 and SUNY Orange in 2019. She works at IBM as a Co-Op Software Developer Engineer. In the fall she will become an IBM Apprentice to continue working in Software Development. Cindy is also a tutor outside of NGCC and IBM. She loves working with children and hopes to help her community any way she can and make a difference.

Taylor Dinardo, who mentored the Monday sessions of NGCC, is a recent graduate of SUNY New Paltz. She began her work with Girls Who Code as a TA for the Summer Immersion Program in 2020. Later that year, she was a part of the winning team for the HVTechFest Hackathon. This summer she will be working for Verizon as a Predictive Analytics intern where she can more deeply explore her interest in data science. Taylor will be continuing her studies in computer science at SUNY New Paltz’s graduate program in the fall. She hopes to continue to be a resource for young women who are interested in coding because she believes that computer science is a field in which girls can flourish.”

Tech entrepreneur and strategist, thought leader, educator, and community manager, Yulia launched #HudsonValleyCanCode initiative in 2016. She founded OpenHub, the Hudson Valley tech center, in 2017.

Since 2019 she organizes the annual Hudson Valley Tech Festival and Hackathon - HVTechFest.

She holds a PhD in Economics from Russian Academy of Science and a MA in Applied Mathematics & Computer Science from Moscow State Technical University of Electronics & Mathematics.