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Career Transitions: Industrial Panel 2022

Molly Baird, Steve Klee, Zijian Li, and Anusha Sekar
Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm
Padelford C-38 and also on zoom at https://washington.zoom.us/j/94529585563

Abstract: As part of the Career Transitions Series, four of our UW alums who are now Mathematicians working in industry will share their experiences in an informal question-and-answer panel. Below are bios for our wonderful panelists.

Molly Baird

Working at Pacific Northwest National Lab in Seattle.

Steve Klee

Steve received his PhD from UW in 2010, studying problems in geometric combinatorics under Isabella Novik. After that, he did a two-year postdoc at UC Davis and spent nine years as a professor in the Mathematics Department at Seattle University. He is currently an Applied Scientist with the OpenSearch team at Amazon Web Services, where he uses machine learning tools to improve the relevance of results that are returned by search engines.

 Zijian Li

My name is Zijian. I completed my Ph.D. at UW in 2021, after working with Steffen Rohde on quasi-conformal mappings, stochastic processes and adding the Advanced Data Science Option. After that I joined Uber as a data scientist/applied scientist working in the High Capacity Vehicle team. I have been mainly working on designing bus networks, which involves a combination of machine learning, statistics and optimization, in particular the traveling salesman problem and vehicle routing problem.

Anusha Sekar

Originally from Chennai, India, Anusha Sekar received her Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Washington, Seattle.  Her research interests at the UW included numerical analysis, numerical methods for wave propagation and geophysical inverse problems.  She joined Chevron as in 2009 and has been working on various problems related to seismic imaging and full waveform inversion (FWI). She currently took a year-long sabbatical to go back to school and earned a Masters in Computer Science degree from Rice University, and now works on machine learning solutions for seismic interpretation and imaging.

She has also served on the board of the SIAM Texas Louisiana section, working towards promoting collaboration between mathematicians in industry and academia in the Texas-Louisiana region. She is currently in the SIAM membership committee.  She is married with two daughters, loves reading and going on road trips with her family.

This talk will be hosted by  Sara Billey and Stark Ryan.  

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