CMG Be Curious Series: A Conversation with Anoush Najarian

Amanda Hendley:
Alright, I’m opening the waiting room. Welcome, everyone! We are recording this session so it will be available on the website afterward. My name is Amanda Hendley, Executive Director of CMG—the Computer Measurement Group. This is our “Be Curious” series where we talk with interesting people about important topics in tech. We aim to leave each session a little more educated and a lot more curious.

CMG is a membership organization for IT technical professionals. We focus on performance engineering, capacity planning, innovation, and more. We’d love to have you join us.

Some quick announcements before we start:

• CMG Impact 2025 Conference: June 5–6 at MathWorks HQ in Natick. Expect keynotes, workshops, a hackathon, and lots of peer learning.

• Impact Innovation Awards: Applications are open now at cmgimpact.com. These awards recognize teams doing transformative work in tech.

• April 23 AI & Mainframe Event in Toronto: Hosted at IBM’s Markham Lab with speakers from IBM, Bank of Montreal, DataKinetics, and Broadcom. Free to attend—just cover travel!

Now, I’ll turn it over to our moderator, Rich Byrnes. Rich is VP of Strategy and Development at GTSG, with a diverse background in tech, including a successful turnaround at Swank and roles at IBM.

Rich Byrnes:
Thank you, Amanda. I’m genuinely giddy to have this conversation today.

Let me introduce today’s guest: Anoush Najarian. She’s a software engineering manager at MathWorks, leading a team focused on performance engineering, DEI efforts, and ethical AI. Her team pioneered AI-assisted coding at MathWorks.

She’s co-led, co-coached, and mentored hundreds of speakers and teaching assistants worldwide. She holds a Red Diploma from Yerevan State University in applied math and CS, plus two master’s degrees from the University of Illinois.

She’s served on organizing committees for conferences on performance engineering, machine learning, and AI. She’s a past Chair and current Director on the CMG Board, co-chaired sessions at Grace Hopper, ICML, and more. She was even named one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics.

And yes, we’re still talking about one person.

So, Anoush, let’s start with what your responsibilities are today at MathWorks.

Anoush Najarian:
Thank you, Rich, Amanda, and CMG! I’ve been at MathWorks for almost 17 years—that’s not even a long time here! Our team works on MATLAB and Simulink—software that supports engineers and scientists in their work. Sometimes that’s working on a Prius; sometimes it’s landing a spacecraft on a comet.

We focus on performance: making things run faster and more efficiently, including memory and battery usage. We also explore observability, scalability, cloud, and AI.

We help make sure MATLAB launches quickly and builds tools that enable colleagues to better understand and improve performance. AI is also key for us, especially embedded AI, where models run on small, low-power devices.

Rich Byrnes:
I saw MathWorks at Supercomputing 24—your presence was really prominent and accessible, even to someone like me who’s not a technical expert. It was impressive.

Now, tell us how you got into this field.

Anoush Najarian:
Thank you. And thanks for your prep work—you really made this a grounded conversation.

My path into this field feels like a confluence of accidents, but also some intention. I recently reflected on it while helping my kids with their college applications. I come from a line of engineers—three of my four grandparents were engineers, including my grandmother, a civil engineer.

My dad was an electrical engineer in the USSR. He created many inventions, and due to the tech he worked with, he couldn’t legally leave the country for 72 years. Fortunately, the Soviet Union collapsed, and he was able to visit us in the US.

I was always interested in math, and through that, discovered computer science. That journey led me to two master’s degrees in Illinois and eventually to MathWorks and performance engineering—which ties together math and computer science beautifully.

Rich Byrnes:
You talk a lot about coaching and mentoring. How did that become such a central part of your work?

Anoush Najarian:
Building things together has always been a theme for me. It helps us grow technically and brings our communities closer. I’m not much of a “words” person—I prefer to build and learn together.

At CMG and other conferences, we’ve created hands-on workshops like “AI on a Raspberry Pi,” “Deep Learning and IoT,” and more. We’d walk into a room with 500 Raspberry Pis and get them all running. It was intense, but it showed others that complex topics are approachable—and gave us all the courage to keep learning.

Rich Byrnes:
And you’ve been doing AI long before the rise of ChatGPT, right?

Anoush Najarian:
Yes! AI’s been around for decades. My CS background exposed me to the theoretical side early on, and I’ve been working on applied AI for the past 10–15 years. I’ve learned a lot from colleagues like Louver Walker Hannon and Shruti Karukar, who helped me dive into hardware and embedded AI.

Rich Byrnes:
How did you get involved with CMG?

Anoush Najarian:
I stumbled on CMG through a web search and noticed they offered mentorship for new speakers. That drew me in. I was inspired by pioneers like Dr. Connie Smith and peers like Elizabeth Stahl and Cleo Zolito. Over time, I grew more involved—as a speaker, board member, and eventually chair.

CMG has amazing people and deep roots in performance engineering. Folks like Amanda, Kevin Mobley, Sinduja, and Nayara continue to make it special.

Rich Byrnes:
Let’s talk about your ethical AI work.

Anoush Najarian:
Sure. AI is everywhere now. Having grown up in a surveillance state, I understand the risks of technology used unethically.

I’ve learned a lot from leaders like Dr. Joy Buolamwini (Algorithmic Justice League), Dr. Timnit Gebru (DAIR), Dr. Margaret Mitchell, and others who’ve pioneered model documentation, dataset transparency, and ethical frameworks.

Books like Race After Technology by Dr. Ruha Benjamin and Algorithms of Oppression by Dr. Safiya Noble have also shaped my thinking. We’ve hosted book clubs and discussions to help our teams stay grounded in ethical AI.

Rich Byrnes:
That brings us to advice. What would you tell someone listening today?

Anoush Najarian:
Listen. That’s advice I’ve heard again and again from leadership experts, and it’s true. Listen to others, their stories, their feedback.

And, as my dear colleague Louver says: lift others up. Keep doing that wherever and whenever you can.

Amanda Hendley:
That’s a perfect place to end. Thank you, Anoush and Rich, for this thoughtful and inspiring conversation. To everyone watching—go out there and be the change.

Anoush Najarian is a Software Engineering Manager at MathWorks where she leads a team focusing on performance engineering, and helps nurture grassroots DEI (diversity, equity inclusion) and Ethical AI efforts. Anoush’s team pioneered the AI-assisted coding work at MathWorks. Passionate about making the tech community welcoming to everyone, Anoush co-led and co-coached teams of hundreds of speakers and power TAs (teaching assistants), most of whom are women, to build highly technical (and fun!) workshops that have since been presented to thousands of participants around the world.
Anoush holds a Red Diploma from Yerevan State University in Applied Math/Computer Science. Anoush was awarded a fellowship for a non-degree graduate program in Economics by the US Department of State. Anoush holds two Master’s of Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: in Math and in Computer Science.
Anoush served on the organizing committees of conferences focusing on computer science, performance engineering, and machine learning/AI research. Anoush is the Board Director and Past Chair of the Board of Directors of CMG (Computer Measurement Group) https://www.cmg.org/, a professional organization of performance engineers. Anoush has been serving on the conference committees of ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) https://icpe2025.spec.org/, reviewer for the workshop “Algorithmic Fairness through the Lens of Metrics and Evaluation” (AFME) https://www.afciworkshop.org/, and committee member for IEEE 7009.1 Standard for Safety Management of Autonomous and Semi-Autonomous Systems–Interventions in the Event of Anomalous Behavior https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/7009.1/11850/ Anoush served as the AI and Data Science Co-Chair of GHC (Grace Hopper Celebration) https://ghc.anitab.org/, the inaugural Virtual Co-Chair of ICML (International Conference on Machine Learning) https://icml.cc/, and Meetup Co-Chair of NeurIPS https://neurips.cc/. Anoush is the Senior Organizer of the WiML (Women in Machine Learning) Mentorship Program https://sites.google.com/view/wimlmentorship202425/ Anoush is on the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics list; for more about Anoush’s background and involvement in Ethical AI, see: https://medium.com/women-in-ai-ethics/iamthefutureofai-anoush-najarian-49b13029dbca