Nina Godiwalla

Nina Godiwalla was born in Texas, USA and grew up in an immigrant family. She worked at JP Morgan as an intern when she was nineteen years old in 1997. She was accepted in the Morgan Stanley Scholars Program and worked there in a summer internship. Nina Godiwalla is the author of "Suits: A Woman on Wall Street", a memoir about her experience at Morgan Stanley. The book was published by Atlas & Co. in 2011 and distributed by W.W. Norton & Company. She is a Parsi and her heritage is Persian-Indian. She was raised in a suburb north of Houston, Texas, USA with her parents, grandmother and three sisters. Her sister, Shireen is five years older than her. Her sister Farah is one year older. Lena is Nina's younger sister by four years. Nina's father is Adil and he is a civil engineer who designed roads and runways for the city of Houston. Nina's mother Arnavaz, worked as an administrative assistant.She was raised a zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion. She is also the CEO of MindWorks, which provides stress management and meditation training to corporations and other professional organizations. Before founding MindWorks, she spent almost a decade working for Fortune 500 corporations. Nina speaks nationally on leadership and diversity in the workplace and has been featured in several major publications including Bloomberg BusinessWeek, ABC News, and The Washington Post. Nina Godiwalla has a MBA from Wharton School of Business in 2006, a MA in liberal arts focused in Creative Writing from Dartmouth, and a BBA from the University of Texas at Austin in 1997. In 2006, Godiwalla joined Johnson & Johnson as assistant product director, where she helped launch an e-commerce business for SPLENDA. She also led marketing and advertising strategies for the company, leading to major increases in sales and return on investment. In this internal start-up role, she was involved in taking unprecedented financial and operations risks for the company, but it also led her to some of her proudest career achievements. She went on to manage Johnson & Johnson's $165 million TYLENOL Upper Respiratory Brand. Nina is a bestselling author who speaks internationally on leadership and diversity issues for prominent institutions including The White House, Harvard Business School, NASA, Smithsonian, The Wall Street Journal Executive Task Force, and TED Conference. She is a trained mind-based stress reduction (MBSR) instructor who has directed leadership programs at Wharton School of Business. Along with Barbara Bush and Sandra Day O'Connor, Ms. Godiwalla was honored into the Texas Women's Hall of Fame. She gave a talk on her experience in the finance world at TEDxHouston in 2011. In 2012 she accepted the invitation by the White House, Office of the President, to serve on their Leadership Roundtable, and she also serves on Governor Rick Perry's Business Council. Nina has trained executives on Hillary Clinton's staff. She is often featured in major media including USA Today, Forbes Magazine, Elle Magazine, NPR, ABC News and CNN. Nina Godiwalla had written for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Houston Chronicle and the Austin Business Journal. She lives in Austin, Texas with her husband.