STEM Brown Bag Lunch Series

Mercy launched a STEM Brown Bag Lunch Series featuring young women in engineering and the sciences. STEM series coordinator Dr. Bradley said, “I started this speaker series because I believe that there are so many STEM related fields that our students could learn about by having these guests tell them their stories—How they got to this point in their careers, why they chose STEM fields, what interests them, what they are currently working on, and how they are impacted by being a female in a very male dominated career. These speakers give our students a view of their lives before college, during college, and after college and they educate them on possible career paths that they wouldn’t otherwise learn about.”

JOT SAMRA ‘15

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN’S SOCIETY OF WOMEN ENGINEERS (SWE): STACEY ZENG, EMILY WOODMAN, AND ANJANA SURESH

Students gained valuable insights from three women in science students majoring in engineering at the University of Michigan’s SWE. Junior Stacey Zeng and senior Emily Woodman shared their research as students studying Chemical Engineering. Emily also spoke about the field of biopharmaceutical engineering. Meanwhile, junior Anjana Suresh shared her experience as an Industrial & Operations Engineering student and what it’s like to study statistics.

MICHELLE BRALEY PH.D. ‘11

Michelle Braley Ph.D. ‘11, a Patent Agent in the Patent Prosecution Morrison & Foerster LLP in Palo Alto, shared her journey through college and graduate school as a woman in the physical sciences, and she described what working in intellectual property law has entailed. Michelle graduated from Colgate University in 2015 with a B.A. in Biochemistry and a minor in Political Science. After graduating, she earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in Biochemistry, Molecular and Structural Biology from UCLA in 2020. Her doctoral research was focused on characterizing enzymes within the Coenzyme Q biosynthetic pathway. While working as a Patent Agent by day, Michelle is also attending law school part-time at Santa Clara at night, in hopes of becoming a Patent Attorney.

The first featured guest speaker was Software Engineer Jot Samra ‘15, who earned her degree in Computer Science and her Masters in Information and Data Science from U.C. Berkeley. During her undergraduate years, Jot interned at Amazon and then accepted an offer to return full-time after graduation. She shared her journey and transition from an engineering student to an Amazon engineer. Jot said, “I was inspired to pursue a degree in computer science by the ever increasing role that technology plays in our daily lives. Especially having grown up in the Bay Area, we are at the center of innovation in the world. I wanted to educate myself to be a part of the innovation disrupting the tech industry. Studying computer science opened the door to many diverse job opportunities, and I ultimately became a software engineer because I was drawn to the opportunities to work on cutting edge technology and the great work life balance that the industry offers.”