UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — From startups to the C-suite, Haley Friary-Schenk spent a career launching IPOs and serving as a human relations executive.
Now, she’s using her time as a student in Penn State’s Smeal College of Business to launch a business from the ground up with the support from the school’s curriculum-to-company pipeline and expert network of mentors, advisers, professors and even fellow students.
“My coursework is absolutely almost in lockstep with the phases of development of the business, whether it's writing the business plan or it's bringing up a company from nothing,” Friary-Schenk said.
She is a member of the first-ever cohort of students in the school’s artificial intelligence (AI), strategy, leadership and business impact graduate certificate program and a master’s candidate in the corporate innovation and entrepreneurship program, or CIENT.
Friary-Schenk’s enterprise, HumaniCore AI, aims to prevent bias in hiring processes and other human relations functions that use artificial intelligence.
“She's trying to stand up a very sophisticated AI company that could, I think, change the world,” said Shawn Clark, academic director for CIENT online programs and director of Smeal’s Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He’s one of Friary-Schenk’s biggest supporters at Smeal.
A journey from Silicon Valley to Happy Valley
Friary-Schenk’s Penn State story started long before graduate school. She grew up across the Ohio state line from Pittsburgh and remembers watching Nittany Lion football with her grandfather. Higher education, she said, wasn’t a priority for her family.
But Friary-Schenk had other ideas.
She landed in California at a time when Silicon Valley’s scrappy tech leaders didn’t care about college degrees or academic pedigrees.
“Startups ran very lean, and they said, ‘Hey, you're smart, figure it out.’ I had a group of wonderful CEOs that just believed in me, gave me free rein and allowed me to thrive,” she recalled.
She has completed three IPOs, two she led for HR. She shepherded a fourth company through the S-1 process.
It wasn’t always easy, Friary-Schenk noted, as she pulled up a photo on her computer screen.
“I'm looking at a picture here from one of the IPOs I did, and it's me and 13 male leaders,” she said.
While she didn’t follow a traditional path, Friary-Schenk said she always knew she wanted to further her education. That journey started with an associate degree from California’s Santa Rosa Junior College. Then, around 2010, she registered for her first online class at Penn State, attracted by both her childhood memories and the school’s robust distance learning program.
“I tried to take a class every semester, but it was hard, because I was traveling internationally for business,” she said. “I would be in the Middle East or China, and had no ability to have a good internet connection, so it just depended on where I was in work and life.”
Ultimately, she remained committed to online classes at Penn State. In 2025, Friary-Schenk traveled to University Park to walk across the stage as she graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in organizational leadership.
Friary-Schenk and her daughter, Aly, were featured in this LinkedIn post that day.
But she wasn’t done yet. Now remarried, Friary-Schenk’s husband encouraged her to pursue a master’s degree. Choosing Smeal was a no-brainer, she said.
“I didn't look at any other grad schools because I had such a phenomenal experience at Penn State with World Campus,” she said.
‘Solving a problem created by AI’
Last fall, a friend invited Friary-Schenk to speak at a conference on AI and human resources.
“We were just starting to realize that AI was being used a lot more in recruiting, and some of the impacts, but the conclusions to the impacts had not been tied together,” she said.
A class action lawsuit filed in 2023, for example, alleged that the screening processes in one human resources management platform used by major corporations around the world discriminated against potential hires on the basis of race, age and disability.
Friary-Schenk launched HumaniCore AI in October.
“Our premise is to bring fairness back into any AI-enabled people decisions, and to make sure that the vendors that are supplying those tools to the enterprises are independently audited to make sure that they are federally compliant and state compliant,” she said. “What my company is doing is solving problems that AI creates.”
The ultimate entrepreneur, backed by Smeal
HumaniCore AI was born and grown inside Smeal’s CIENT curriculum. For example, Friary-Schenk said, courses like Business Modeling and New Ventures aligned directly with development of the company’s pitch strategy.
The new AI program rounded out her goals perfectly.
“She started to take full advantage of all that Penn State has to offer,” said Clark, the CIENT academic director.
Friary-Schenk sought advice and networking opportunities from professors including Clark and Jeanette Miller, associate director of the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship, as well as Michael Zaydon in Smeal’s Propel Business Advisory Network.
“We've been with her every step of the way,” Clark said.
Students in Clark’s 480: Management course were brought on board to consult as part of a class project, broadening their undergraduate experience while helping Friary-Schenk with real-world business challenges.
Miller also reflected on Friary-Schenk's input during the New Venture Creation course.
“It was a joy to have her contribute to course discussion within a diverse student population based on her rich professional career,” Miller said. “It was also rewarding to have her report back that she was immediately implementing each step learned from the class into her venture in real time. That is the tangible value of education.”
The vast support stretches from Penn State’s College of Engineering and Penn State Dickinson Law, too.
Clark noted that the fact that Friary-Schenk leveraged all these resources is indicative of her business acumen.
“That ability to attract and identify and approach different types of resources is really a true entrepreneurial competency,” he said.
For Friary-Schenk, it’s all just part of a lifelong dream to complete her education.
“Penn State became the place where I returned to finish what I started, and where I am now building the company designed to close the fairness gap AI enabled tools are creating in the workplace,” she said. “I'm beyond proud of my school.”
Editor's Note: As of July 8, HumaniCore AI, founded by Haley Friary-Schenk along with Aly Orloff, Rich Avila, Craig Gutjahr, Anirudh Badia and Dennis Hollenbeck, is one of 27 semifinalist ventures selected out of 531 student-led AI teams from 160 colleges and universities nationwide in Texas A&M's Mays Business School AI Venture Velocity Challenge. The team advanced by treating trust, validation and responsible AI as core product requirements, using Stage 1 to test both the technical system and the credibility needed for adoption.