From Academia To Entrepreneurship: Transferable Skills

Are you wondering which skills from your academic training can help you get your dream position in a non-profit organization, a start-up or a company? Or are you interested in starting your own? This event is your opportunity to hear from two amazing professionals as they discuss their experience leaving academia to develop a project they are passionate about. They will tell you how academia prepared them for this challenge and what they had to learn on the job.

Agenda:

5:45 - 6:15 pm Registration, Networking, & Snacks

6:15 - 7:30 pm Seminar and Q&A

7:30 - 8:00 pm Networking

Speakers (Bios Below):

• Nina Dudnik: Founder and CEO, SeedingLabs

• Marco Lagi: Founder and CTO, Kemvi

Registration

MASS AWIS members $8 · Non-members $15 · Microsoft employee FREE

Speaker Bios

Nina Dudnik

Nina works at the intersection of science and global development. She began the effort to build Seeding Labs as a graduate student in 2003. She was a finalist in the 2006 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition and was awarded an Echoing Green fellowship in 2007 to formally launch and expand Seeding Labs. In 2015, Nina was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people in biotechnology by Scientific American Worldview magazine. She received the 2014 John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award, was a 2010 TEDGlobal Fellow and a 2010 PopTech Social Innovation Fellow, and received the 2010 Massachusetts Nonprofit Network Young Professional award. Nina has experienced science on a global scale; she worked for the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research in Italy, where she provided advice on the integration of molecular genetics techniques into conservation and plant breeding activities. She was a Fulbright scholar in 2000 at the Africa Rice Center in Côte d’Ivoire studying rice introgression using molecular markers. Nina obtained her PhD in molecular biology from Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a BS in biochemistry from Brown University.

Marco Lagi

After receiving his PhD in Chemistry and doing research at MIT in Physics, Marco has worked as a Complex Systems consultant for the intelligence community, the SEC, and the Federal Reserve. His research, published in more than 25 peer-reviewed papers, has been covered by Time, Forbes, Scientific American, and was included in Wired's Top 10 Scientific Discoveries of 2011. He is now the founder and CTO of Kemvi, an artificial intelligence startup in Cambridge, MA.

If you are a student looking for financial assistance to attend this event, please visit www.stayinma.com.