"Black Women and the Ivory Tower: Discovering & Maintaining our Authentic Selves"
Wed March 31st
noon - 1:30pm
Career Panel from 12pm - 1pm
Breakout rooms from 1pm - 1:30pm
RSVP: tinyurl.com/MSKcareer21
MIT Black Women's Week Annual Alumnae Career Panel.
Sponsored by MSK & BWA
Whether studying, working, living, or just visiting elite institutions like MIT, the pressure to acclimate to the dominant culture is ever present. Those pressures can often suffocate our desires to be our authentic selves. And on the other hand, narrow ideas of racial and gender authenticity can hamper self-discovery. Our distinguished and accomplished panel of MIT Alumnae, from various generations; disciplines; and backgrounds, will talk about how they were able to navigate these spaces, the struggles they faced, the sacrifices they made, the prices they paid, and the power they claimed by being true to themselves, their natures, their values, and their beliefs.
Panelists:
Joy Ekuta ‘13
Stephanie Espy ‘01
Kathryn Harris ‘12
Kristala Jones Prather ‘94
Kerone Vatel ’00
Moderator: Mercy Oladipo '23
Joy Ekuta is 2013, Course 9 Graduate. She is currently the Founder & CEO of Hostowambe, an end-to-end marketplace to connect event planners with people who want to host events. The goal is to enable event planners to build credibility and create collaborative experience with clients, while also providing a solution to automatically keep clients updated at each stage of the planning process. Prior to founding Hostowambe, Joy worked in Recruiting, Program Management, and Research at two early stage startups, Two Sigma, Duke, and the OEOP. Outside of work, she is also a co-founder of ImpactLabs, a non-profit organization based in Nigeria that teaches hands-on engineering skills to high school and early college students. She has a passion for creating inclusive environments and exposing underrepresented & underestimated people to opportunities in tech. Whether you want to talk about ethics in tech, the challenges of being a black woman founder, or the best ways to learn salsa and bachata, she's your woman.
Stephanie Espy: I am one of the women who earns 19 percent of bachelor’s degrees in engineering as well as one of the minority women awarded 3 percent of bachelor’s degrees in engineering. I earned a BS in chemical engineering from MIT, MS in chemical engineering from UC Berkeley and MBA from Emory University. I have felt the gender gap first hand; I have sat in classrooms and worked in industry where I can count on one hand the number of women in the room. Fortunately for me, I grew up with strong STEM influences. Both of my parents are engineers. Two of my three siblings have STEM degrees. Uncles, aunts and cousins are scientists, programmers, engineers and mathematicians. I’ve been lucky to have so many role models in my reach. But, STEM isn’t about having a special brain. I truly believe that STEM doesn’t come from a life of privilege. STEM is simply an exposure to what is possible and an internal believe that anyone can be a STEM Gem. Even you!
Dr. Kathryn Harris graduated from MIT in 2012 with a B.S.E in Nuclear Science and Engineering. After undergraduate, she received her MD degree from Meharry Medical College. During her medical education, Kathryn spent a year as a research fellow at the NIH studying mitochondrial biology and inflammation. Kathryn is currently a resident in internal medicine at University of Maryland Medical Center. Her ultimate goal is to work as a cardiologist and pursue a career in research and addressing disparities in medicine for African Americans.
Kristala L.J. Prather is the Arthur D. Little Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. She received an S.B. degree from MIT in 1994 and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (1999), and worked 4 years in BioProcess Research and Development at the Merck Research Labs prior to joining MIT. Her research interests are centered on the design and assembly of recombinant microorganisms for the production of small molecules, with additional efforts in novel bioprocess design approaches. A particular focus is the elucidation of design principles for the production of unnatural organic compounds with engineered control of metabolic flux within the framework of the burgeoning field of synthetic biology. Prather is the recipient of an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2005), a Technology Review “TR35” Young Innovator Award (2007), a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2010), the Biochemical Engineering Journal Young Investigator Award (2011), and the Charles Thom Award of the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology (2017). Additional honors include selection as the Van Ness Lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2012), as a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2014-2015), and as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS; 2018).
Kerone Vatel is a Managing Director and Senior Advisor to the Head of Corporate Responsibility. Kerone joined JPMorgan Chase in November 2018 as the Head of Firmwide Business Resiliency and most recently became Senior Advisor to the Head of Corporate Responsibility. Previously, she was a managing director at Goldman Sachs, where she spent over eleven years and most recently served as the Global co-head of Operational Risk Supervision, with global oversight for operational risk management for all divisions of Goldman. Kerone also served as Goldman’s Global Head of Operational Risk Analysis and Strategic Initiatives, where she implemented a new operational risk practice, framework and systems across the firm. Upon joining Goldman Kerone worked in Derivatives Operations Risk where during the 2008 financial crisis she was instrumental in building out trading controls and reporting to capture the full operational exposure to key counterparties. She then parlayed this into helping to build out Goldman’s first large-scale reporting data warehouse. Prior to Goldman, Kerone spent six years at Capital One in its Card Business. Kerone holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Kerone is a co-sponsor of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens Spring Gala.