How to Rise Above the Downturn?
The skills you gained through your PhD can help you thrive in a recession. We have all heard that the PhD job market was challenging even during the economic boom, so what about now, in the recession? Skills developed while earning a PhD can actually give doctoral degree holders an advantage during challenging economic times. Learn how to leverage your strengths as an academically-trained, highly-skilled worker in this practical session. You’ll learn what you have in your skill set as a PhD and what extra preparation you will need to thrive-and how to get that preparation.
The speakers featured:
David Waterman
David Waterman (PhD '18) is a dual-career scientist and entrepreneur, a PhD recipient from Brandeis and a SPROUT and I-CORPS alumnus. While in graduate school, David founded GreenLabs Recycling, a locally owned and operated lab plastic recycling company that services academic, pharma and biotech labs in the Greater Boston Area. Together with the team at GreenLabs Recycling, David turned a world-wide problem in plastic waste into a rapidly-growing business. When not recycling plastic, David can be found in the lab at MIT’s Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research where he studies how healthy cells develop into cancers. David has been tapped as a consultant for companies specializing in drug development and advises lab facilities on innovative ways to meet their sustainability goals.
Nathan Cohen
Dr. Nathan Cohen is the CEO of Fractal Antenna Systems of Bedford, Massachusetts. He is a physicist and radio astronomer with a background in electromagnetics, fractal geometry, and imaging. A graduate of Brandeis University, he received an M.S. and Ph.D. from Cornell University and has held research or professorial positions at Harvard, MIT, Cornell, and Boston Universities, Arecibo Observatory, and NASA (JPL and Ames). He holds 64 U.S. utility patents, and 50 pending patents, including ‘source’ patents on fractal antennas, fractal resonators, metamaterial lenses, invisibility cloaks and deflector shields, fractal metamaterials and radiative transfer, fractal batteries, fractal electromagnets, fractal absorbers, cancer treatments, superconductivity, autonomous road navigation, and 3D printing. He is recognized as a leading world authority on these and related subjects. He has published over 100 technical articles and four books and is a Fellow of the Radio Club of America where he was awarded the Lee DeForest Award for substantial contributions to radio/wireless communications.
Domenico Bullara
Domenico Bullara is a Nonlinear Chemist currently working as Quantitative System Pharmacologist for the Novartis Institute of Biomedical Research. His expertise is in developing and analyzing mathematical models for the dynamical behavior of complex chemical and biological systems. Before his current focus on biochemical modelling for drug discovery, he has extensively worked in the field of spatiotemporal pattern formation in nonlinear chemistry during his PhD years at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and his postdoctoral appointment at Brandeis University.
Illana Goldberg
Dr. Ilana Goldberg joined the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) in 2019 as a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow. She currently has oversight of discovery and research grants with an emphasis on biophotonics. Dr. Goldberg earned her B.S. degree from Brandeis University in Chemistry and Biochemistry, where she gained expertise in protein crystallography. She earned her Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University in solid state and analytical chemistry where she focused on the crystal growth of secondary explosives. In 2005 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study crystal engineering, polymorphism, and co-crystallization of small molecules at Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, Israel.
