Thomas is an executive coach and leadership development educator. He believes deeply in the human capacity for meaningful growth and helping his clients and students grow is what drives him.

As an executive coach, Thomas helps his clients identify their goals and plot paths to reach them. Often obstacles obstruct these paths or new paths must be forged and it can seem difficult to make progress toward our goals. Thomas works with clients to help them unlock potential—to explore, spot, and overcome the obstacles. Using a non-directive approach rooted more in inquiry than advice, Thomas helps clients view challenges with new perspective in order to find approaches that fit their unique situations.

As a leadership development educator, Thomas strives to empower each student to more powerfully connect with the people in their lives by developing their communications skills. To develop these skills, Thomas identifies each person’s unique strengths and areas for growth. He then works with them to bring about that growth through experience so that key lessons are not just understood but cemented in tangible life experiences from which they can draw. Developing each person’s unique abilities in this way cultivates the authentic leader within.

Thomas is a lecturer at both UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, where he teaches Coaching and Communications classes for MBA students, and Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership, where he teaches Communications for master and doctorate students. His clients span organizations that include: Salesforce.com, Quip, Adobe, Fastly, Booking.com, Western Digital, Applied Materials, KPMG, Pacific Gas & Electric, Lawrence Berkeley and Sandia National Laboratories, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, etc.

Thomas has 15+ years of experience in the technology sector working in start-up as well as pre- and post-IPO environments. He has held positions in Operations, Business Development, Product Management, and Strategic Partnerships and he has led multicultural, globally-distributed teams. He has roots in education, having taught high school Latin and Ancient Greek prior to his business career. He holds an MBA and a Certificate in Executive Coaching from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and a BA in Classics from College of the Holy Cross.

Ariela Morgenstern is an executive coach and facilitator, who specializes in bringing intention and vitality to professionals' leadership presence and presentations.

From seasoned CEOs looking to upskill their communication, to post-MBA professionals entering the workforce, to individuals navigating a new industry’s landscape, Ariela’s communications coaching provides an expert, outside-eye assessment of strengths and clearly articulated areas of improvement. Using her extensive knowledge of the voice and codified body movement analysis from her 20+ years of professional performance experience across the country, she uses concrete tools and vocal pedagogy to unlock people’s voices, expand their presence, get them more comfortable and expressive in their body, and to authentically connect to and command a room. Her coaching clients have included individuals at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Blackhawk Genomics, the U.S. Geological Survey, and she will be starting a new coaching engagement at Salesforce this spring.

Her executive coaching work is dedicated to helping people unlock for themselves new possibilities and growth. Using the modalities and methods of inquiry she’s honed at the Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute (BECI) where she now teaches, and with her experience working with teams and individuals across a breadth of industries, she empowers her clients to imagine what is possible, and helps to make the insurmountable attainable through actionable goal-setting and a clear road map to success.

Grabbing your audience’s attention amongst a sea of new content can be daunting. Keeping that audience’s attention and creating a memorable experience can be an elusive skill. As a presentation coach Ariela demystifies the writing process and the communications skillset required to consistently connect to an audience and inspire them to action. This requires a focused commitment to personal connection to the material, even when that thread seems impossible to find. Working with her clients preparing for pitches, keynotes, and industry talks, Ariela is adept at pulling that thread and building narrative and personal story into the structure, design, and content of even the most technical of material. Her presentation clients come from eminent tech, data science, government, artistic and academic spheres, and have a nearly perfect track record of landing the job, the client, or the promotion.

Ariela has years of experience in the classroom and has taught classes in Leadership Communications at the UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Center for Executive Education, School of Information, Department of Statistics, the Goldman School of Public Policy, and the UC Davis School of Management. In addition, she teaches and coaches acting at Stanford University and the Berkeley Rep School of Theatre. She has facilitated workshops at the university level and at Bay Area organizations on storytelling, articulating your personal passion, and networking with intention at San Francisco State University, the Oakland Chamber of Commerce leadership program, tech startup Kalamuna, and with BECI.

Ariela has over 20+ years as a communications specialist and pulls from her years of experience working in operations in a variety of industries, including Manufacturing, Venture Capital, Real Estate, and Tech. She holds a Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance at UC Santa Cruz, is a proud union member, and has performed opera and musical theatre professionally in New York, Europe and at the largest theatres across the country for a decade before returning home to the Bay Area to get her coaching certification from the Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute.

Mehmet Sevinç is the Director of Business Development at Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute, where he oversees establishing and enhancing new and existing partnerships both locally and globally. He is also a communications consultant, lecturer and an executive coach with a consulting background in business intelligence.

Mehmet’s business intelligence consulting background enabled him to work in various different industries such as energy, financial services, non-profit, higher education, biotech, pharmaceutical, technology, Internet Security and social networking. He is a certified Oracle Hyperion Developer. He managed local and offshore teams and worked in three different continents: Asia, Europe and North America.

After participating in a two-day workshop with Dr. Mark Rittenberg and his team in August 2013, which included sharing leadership stories, dreams and aspirations with his colleagues, Mehmet became a big fan of Mark’s teaching methods and decided to quit his business intelligence career and moved into leadership development training with Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute. He has been working a lecturer at University of California, Berkeley with Dr. Rittenberg. He has also taught at University of California, Davis and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Mehmet holds an MBA from San Francisco State University and a BA in Business Administration from Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey. He is a certified executive coach from the Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute. Mehmet won two national sailing championships in his homeland Turkey. He was the captain of the Turkish National Sailing Team between 2001 and 2004. In 2016, he completed Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon in San Francisco. In 2017, he finished Santa Rosa Half Ironman Triathlon and became an Ironman.