Deborah Berebichez, Ph.D. is the Global AI Products Leader at EY, where she leads the integration of AI across EY’s Top Client Technology products, with the aim of ensuring they reflect the forefront of digital innovation. In May she was named the silver winner in the *Extraordinary Woman of the Year* category at the EY Women in Tech Global Awards 2025. She is the host of Dazzling Science, a new series, launched in May, which features women scientists breaking down big ideas such as fusion, modern space exploration, AI for new material discovery, robotics, computer vision and fashion tech.
A physicist and AI expert, Berebichez is the first Mexican woman to earn a Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University, where she studied under Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin. With over two decades of experience in AI, she has led the development of numerous AI-powered products and held senior roles including Quantum Computing Officer and Chief Data Scientist. Berebichez recently spoke to The Innovator about how corporations can attract and retain more women in tech.
Q: Tell us about your role at EY and the award you just received
DB: I started my work almost exactly a year ago at EY as a partner in what we call Client Technology, which is an internally focused group. While the long-term goal is to create technology that will be employed by EY clients to help them to run their businesses better, we consider EY to be our client zero. We want to be the first to try everything we offer our customers. My role is to inject AI into our internal products and to build products that help EY professional services people perform their job better. EY has several major business lines: we do the taxes for major corporations; we advise on transaction strategy, we do assurance and we do consulting, which is an umbrella for a variety of functions and expertise that we have. These diverse business areas can all be enhanced with automation or artificial intelligence.
I don’t really know who nominated me for this award. I was very pleasantly surprised because I am not in a client-facing role. The fact that I was nominated was itself a big deal and I feel really grateful for the recognition. Because I won silver in the extraordinary women in tech category, I was able to meet with all the other global finalists, including the woman who won gold, who is based in Hong Kong and is a top cybersecurity expert. Women of my generation have fought so hard for recognition. There’s still much work to do, but things are getting so much better. This recognition, especially with so many applicants, would have not happened ten to fifteen years ago, not at this scale. I see it as a signal from the market, a recognition that yes, we need not only to create better working environments, but thanks to the contributions of women -who represent half of the world’s population- to create products that will have a better market fit. The best thing companies can do is recognize the work of women, attract women to their teams and refine their products with feedback from women.
Q: Why, in your view, is it important to have diversity on engineering and tech teams?
DB: Take the well-known case of airbags in cars. The teams which designed not only the airbags but cars themselves, were male dominated and so unfortunately, many injuries happened when women were the driver in these cars, because all the dummies that they used to test a car crash had the anatomy of a typical tall male. It’s an example of how when there is no diversity on your tech teams you might not see possible negative outcomes and limit your profits and your success. Prior to working at EY, I was doing consulting, helping medium to large size companies to apply AI and quantum computing. Many times, the companies I worked with were able to create new products by simply starting to focus on a different population that they ignored before. It’s very typical. I work with a lot of male engineers, and I’ve realized that women have different preferences and want different products that fit what they need. And if companies ignore that, it alienates a whole big chunk of the market for them. Paying attention to a segment and a particular customer profile opens the door to creating new products and engaging customers in new ways. In the case of the airbags, the moment they put women on the team, the improvements in design were significant. You need women on your teams and people from different cultures and with different backgrounds. If you don’t have those voices, you’ll never be able to service those markets effectively. ‘
Q: You just launched a video series featuring women in science. What is that all about?
DB: This project started before I joined EY. It took a long time to launch it. There’s a philanthropist, a great female philanthropist, Lyda Hill, who lives in Dallas, Texas, and in 2019 she decided that she wanted to give recognition to 120 female scientists who are alive today. With the help of the American Association for the Advancement of Science she selected 120 women, including me. They gathered all of us in in Dallas, Texas at the Perot Museum, a beautiful museum of science and nature, and they had 3D printed life size statues made of each one of us. Each statue comes with a QR code. They were grouped together to form a traveling exhibit. Seeing all of us together is very powerful. Kids come up with their phone and scan the QR codes to get access to videos that each one of us created for them.The participating women scientists had the opportunity to apply for grants that would allow us to expand on any activity that we wanted to do. Two years ago I applied for a grant to do a female-led video series. I previously had hosted one of the most popular and successful shows on TV for the Science Channel and for Discovery Channel called Outrageous Acts of Science. I’m such a passionate believer that video is a great medium to make science accessible and fun and entertaining, so I was delighted to win a grant to create a video series. I scripted it, hired the filming crew – people who are very, very good, who had filmed only for the top TV shows- and I recruited amazing women scientists to take part, including Jessica Banks, a robotics specialist, who was just featured in a very successful Netflix show called ‘Hack Your Home.’ My good friend Jennifer Lopez, who is a well-known National Geographic Explorer, joined us to talk about modern space exploration. Amanda Parkes talks about AI and fashion and Alexa Lachmann from Columbia discusses nuclear fusion. I produced the series last year. We’re launching it now, and I’m hoping that it gathers all the attention it deserves, because these scientists are just fabulous and inspiring!
Q: Do you hope through that series to attract more women to embrace STEM ( Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)
DB: Absolutely, when I was growing up in Mexico City I had a typical childhood in a conservative community that really preferred women do the typical female things of the time: study something like communications or marketing, get married in your early 20s, have a family and let the men focus on the big jobs and the big careers. I was born very curious, and I was super inquisitive about the world. I didn’t fit in in that community, and people very openly discouraged me. They told me I had to be a genius if I wanted to study physics or math, and I clearly wasn’t. I really wish I had role models during that time. I wish there would have been a video series that I could point my parents to and say: ‘Look at those women. They’re successful and they’re fun and they’re normal and they are doing science, and it’s okay.’ I didn’t have that, and so I had to fight, in secret, in silence, reading books by obscure physicists and experts that inspired me and do it behind everyone’s back. I applied to schools in the U.S, but my parents didn’t have the money to pay for a full American education. Brandeis University had the Wien International Scholarship Program (WISP) for international students: only two students get it each year: and they offered me one. That opened the door to my future. I moved to Massachusetts and managed to cram the whole physics major into only two years, I was mentored by a graduate student from India named Roopesh Ojha. I wanted to pay him for all his mentoring and tutoring and he told me that the only way I could pay him back was to mentor and inspire others. It became my life’s mission. I engage in public talks, video series, TV shows, everything that gets the word out there that there are women who are critical thinkers, amazing scientists and creative technologists, in the hope of inspiring more women to launch careers in STEM.
Q: What advice do you have for corporations?
DB: In the past 15 years companies have focused a lot on hiring women, but that’s not enough. My advice is focus on retaining and empowering and celebrating the success of women in your workforce. Many female friends of mine work in technology. When they leave their jobs, I ask them ‘What would have made you stay?’ Many times, the answer is not more money, it is more recognition and acknowledgement that their contribution is valued. Initiatives like EY’s award go a long way because when women feel celebrated, when we feel accepted and that our work is valued, it makes a big difference. It should not be about ticking a box so a company can say I have 20% women io my engineering team. The motivation should be that you appreciate what we bring to the table. It is in a company’s own interest. If you don’t value women, you’re unlikely to reach your full market potential.
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