Women in STEM Careers

Close to 30 students – including 23 girls - attended the panel discussion on Women in STEM Careers, hosted by a new student club, Supporting Women in STEM. Club leaders Stephanie Do '19 and Rebecca Dunayev '19 led the panel discussion as Zhihong An, Quantitative Analyst and Global Analytics at Alliance Bernstein, Ida Dunayev, Senior Director of Information Technology, Johnson and Johnson, Helen Eisenach, Scientist at M6P Therapeutics, and Klara Neginsky, Senior Director of IT and Information Security at UnitedHealth Group shared their experiences working in STEM field. They discussed what their typical days look like, gender discrimination in the workplace, advice for girls pursuing STEM careers and more.
Panelists' bios:

Zhihong An, Quantitative Analyst and Global Analytics at Alliance Bernstein
After graduating from Columbia University, Zhihong started to work as a Programmer/Analyst in a Hedge Fund company specializing in Japanese derivatives. Four years later, Zhihong moved to Alliance Bernstein as a Quantitative Analyst working in performance attribution, portfolio analytics and market analytics. Zhihong's current work is in the investment risk area, analyzing portfolio and benchmark’s VaR (value-at-risk), standard deviation, market exposure, etc.
 
Ida Dunayev, Senior Director of Information Technology, Johnson and Johnson 
As a head of Enterprise Architecture for Corporate IT, Ida is responsible for all decisions on technologies used by Finance, Human Resources, Procurement, Legal and other corporate business functions. She likes the field of Enterprise Architecture because, just like architecture for designing new buildings, it requires a balance of art and science to create solutions that are both practical and elegant. Her background in software development and system architecture.
 
Helen Eisenach, Scientist at M6P Therapeutics
Helen’s primary academic interests are protein science and biologics. She  interned (on two separate occasions) at Amicus Therapeutics, working on downstream purification and development processes for therapeutics targeting Fabry and Pompe's diseases. Other intern experiences include atmospheric chemistry in the Wofsy Lab at Harvard University. Her current work at M6P Therapeutics is focused on therapeutics targeting Gaucher disease.
 
Klara Neginsky, Senior Director of IT and Information Security at UnitedHealth Group
Klara is an experienced information technologist and advocate for securely enabling business goals. Her recent expertise is in securing messaging and collaboration initiatives, development of strategic cloud computing security architectures, identification of strategic security changes to support adoption of cutting-edge technologies.
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