Latha Chembrakalam

Vice President and Head of Technical Center, Continental Automotive

Latha Chembrakalam, Vice President and Head of Technical Center, Continental Technical Center India (TCI) leads R&D activities for global and local markets, catering to OEMs across the world. Latha is a result-driven and collaborative leader with three decades of global experience across various multinational organizations like Bosch and Siemens.

Read the blog to know more about her career achievements and contributions.

Leadership in Action

Accredited as a leader with entrepreneurial spirit and exceptional relationship building at strategic levels, she has a proven track record of creating strategic foot prints for the GCoEs that she worked for. She is a champion of diversity of thoughts and uses that to drive culture transformation in organizations.

Latha is responsible for driving innovation (R&D) for business areas including Autonomous Mobility, Safety and Motion, Smart Mobility, User Experience, and Architecture and Networking. Additionally, she also leads core engineering functions in the current role including Engineering Services, Artificial Intelligence, Architecture and Software, and Processes Methods and Tools (PMT) areas, and CoEs (SW, System, Product and Agile). Currently, she is working on complex, advanced, and innovative products and technologies catering to both global and local markets, which includes rapid growth in numbers, competence, and capacity for TCI.

Latha was the Head of Powertrain and Electrification at Robert Bosch Engineering, heading a team of engineers across Bangalore (India), Coimbatore, and Vietnam. She has been instrumental to set up CoEs at Bosch in the area of electrification and simulation.

She said, “With strong technical knowledge combined with business and excellent people skills able to grow in a fast way in every role and every organization that I worked with”.

She is always open to learning continuously and has upgraded herself in technology, business, and strategy that helped her succeed.

Awards and Recognitions

Latha has received the Women Leader of the Year and the Best Engineering Head awards at Bosch. She was honored as a Diversity promoter and selected as an esteemed speaker at the global Women in Engineering IEEE conference in 2021.

She also participates as a speaker in several industry forums such as NASSCOM, IEEE WIE global forums, CII, SAE India, and academic forums. She is an ex-EXECOM member of the IEEE Bangalore wing and took part in several IEEE-academia-industry engagements with the IEEE Kerala wing.

Social Impact

Latha stands strong for the women empowerment in technology that goes beyond the scope of her organization by coaching many young leaders out of their interest through EWIT. She has mentored several women and lectured at USTech, Samsung, TVS, IEE, Hero Motors, AVALARA, etc., to support and inspire young engineers in technology.

She has been instrumental in establishing industry-academia and research body connects, and in designing and organizing several hackathons. She started the first women’s network at Bosch and worked continuously with HR to develop guiding principles for women empowerment as well as supporting women to continue work after maternity.

She was the President of POSH in her previous organization and has strived to keep a fair workplace. She is a strong advocate for developing female leaders in the industry and community.

Building a Better Future

Latha is determined to make a significant impact in the space of mobility in India and globally by leading teams to deliver value as well as innovative products from India. She is passionate about mentoring and nurturing budding leaders in engineering as well as the business community.

Latha also contributes to several industry bodies like NASSCOM, SAEINDIA, CII, and academia. She is looking forward to being a part of engineering colleges and technology universities in bringing change in the curriculum, which is a need of the hour for academia as well as the industry. She strongly believes in the co-creation of technology, which enables faster transition in all tech domains.

Latha Chembrakalam has been selected as the ‘Top 10 Women Tech Leaders India Awards 2022’ organized by RACE, REVA University in association with Terralogic Inc., for her leadership skills, entrepreneurial spirit, and enabling significant value growth in technology.