Every year, in celebration of International Women’s History Month, the systemwide UC Women in Tech Committee features women IT professionals throughout UC whose work sustains the technology so essential to everyone’s work at the university — from administrators to researchers and clinical staff. Every location WIT group submits one woman or team of women to recognize in the systemwide article, and this year’s UCOP nomination was Barbara Hui from the California Digital Library. You can read about Barbara here.

UCOP WIT is celebrating even more women colleagues who are making a big impact throughout UCOP IT. Here are their stories.

Jenn Bejaka, senior IT project manager

Jenn Bejaka, senior IT project manager

Since joining UCOP in 2017, Senior IT Project Manager Jenn Bejaka has been responsible for bringing sanity and order to a variety of projects, including software implementations, cloud migrations and, most recently, the Building Consolidation Technology (BCT) project, which covered technology installations and upgrades in the Franklin and Broadway buildings.

Jenn enables teams to address challenges collaboratively while progressing toward project goals. She likens her work to guiding a ship on a journey, and finds it exciting when each team gels and finds its way through a project together. She flourished in the complexity of the BCT project, which lasted more than two-and-a-half years — through March 2022. In that role, she ensured that 13 workstreams stayed on track, including network infrastructure, conference room AV and security access control systems.

When she isn’t managing IT projects, Jenn enjoys walking, cooking and international travel. Every week, she gets her heart pumping by taking a refreshing trek up to Wildcat Peak at Tilden Park in Berkeley. Her first post-pandemic international trip was to Scotland in June 2022, where she visited Edinburgh, Glasgow and Loch Ness; a highlight was enjoying high tea with her traveling companions.

Sarah Mathews, IT service management analyst

Sarah Mathews, IT service management analyst, stands by a vintage airplane she recently flew in

Sarah Mathews began working at UCOP in 2015 as a data analyst on the ITS Motive data center move project. In 2016, she switched gears to support UCOP’s ServiceNow Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB). Sarah’s analytical skills and attention to detail are a perfect fit for her new role as an IT service management analyst. Her position aligns well with her personal strengths of being organized, requirements-driven and customer-focused. She enjoys delivering data to help users achieve their organizational goals and objectives.

Sarah has led a range of projects, including Application Onboarding, ITS Application Inventory and Application Owner Data Certification, all of which help ITS understand the systems and applications we support. Sarah also contributes to the ongoing efforts to enhance our security by helping UCOP business partners identify and track their business applications. This supports compliance with UC’s IS-3 Electronic Information Security Policy (PDF) and our overall security posture.

In her free time, Sarah enjoys exploring our local Bay Area parks, camping, cooking, traveling and hanging out with her family. On her last coastal trip, she flew in an open-cockpit vintage airplane!

Babita Sakhrani, IT project manager

Babita Sakhrani, IT project manager, on a recent hiking adventure

Babita Sakhrani joined UCOP in 2012 as an HR functional analyst on the UCPath project. In 2020, she switched gears to be an IT project manager. Project management is a natural calling for Babita, as it aligns with her analytical, organizational and problem-solving strengths. She enjoys helping teams find alignment to achieve each project’s objective.

Babita has managed a variety of IT projects, including data loss prevention; migration of high-profile applications, such as ApplyUC, to Amazon Web Services; and the integration of a Title IX case-management system.

Babita enjoys working at UC because of its culture, diversity, and supportive management and leadership. When she isn’t keeping projects on track, she enjoys hiking, yoga, visiting comedy clubs, hanging out with her family and foreign travel. Her last international trip was to Egypt, in February 2020.

Jenny Zhang, technical support analyst II

Jenny Zhang, technical support analyst II, at her home office

When you call the Service Desk for a technical support issue, you may have a chance to talk with Technical Support Analyst II Jenny Zhang. Jenny has worked at UCOP for more than 35 years, providing technical support to various departments before IT support was centralized. As technology has evolved, so has Jenny’s knowledge of it. She is a lifelong learner, continually developing her expertise on new products and services so that she can support colleagues who need technical help.

Jenny is an avid gardener. If you visited her workstation before the building closure in 2020, you were likely amazed at the many plants flourishing under her green thumb. She also enjoys cooking; one of her favorite meals is a full Thanksgiving dinner, complete with a turkey marinated in her own brine recipe!

Jenny is also a very competitive table tennis player. If table tennis equipment ever returns to the Oakland campus and you find yourself across the table from Jenny, your only hope of winning will be to distract her by asking a very difficult technical support question!

For questions about this article, please contact Judy.Thai@ucop.edu.

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