Join panelists from various disciplines to discuss their career paths from graduate degree to professional. Panelists will address how they used their degrees and training to prepare them for their current positions and any advice they can give to current graduate students. Plenty of time will be given for questions. This is the eight and final event in our eight-part series “The Joyful Journey: Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Scholar Professional Development Series.”

Speakers

Irfan Alam
Irfanul (Irfan) Alam earned his PhD in Biology Education Research from the University of Colorado Boulder (EBIO), where he developed expertise in mixed-methods inquiry. He previously served as a Program Evaluator at the University of Mississippi’s Center for Research Evaluation, leading grant-funded evaluations of education initiatives. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at North Dakota State University, where his work focuses on strengthening cross-institutional collaboration through mixed-methods research and statewide social network analysis under the SPARK-ND initiative.

Mckenzie Dice
Mckenzie Dice is a former Lead Teaching Assistant and a proud MS and PhD graduate of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. After completing her dissertation on Antarctic atmospheric boundary layer dynamics in 2023, she transitioned from academia into applied climate resilience work. She now serves as an Extreme Weather Resilience Specialist and Data Scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton, supporting the U.S. Department of War on extreme weather related risk. Her work focuses on translating complex environmental data into actionable insights for infrastructure resilience, mission readiness, and long term strategic planning.

Olivia Marrese
Olivia graduated from CU with a PhD in Linguistics, specializing in conversation analysis. She is currently a Conversational Architect in AI and Machine Learning at 66degrees, a Google Cloud premier partner. In her role as a consultant and engineer, she designs, builds, and maintains multi agent systems across a variety of industry verticals, and particularly enjoys operationalizing findings from conversational data. Prior to 66, Olivia worked at Quiq, a startup in conversational AI, and as a PhD student she held internships at IBM Almaden and SoundHound AI.

Carli Brucker
Carli Brucker is a former Lead Teaching Assistant for the Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. She graduated in 2023 with her MS and PhD in Hydrology and Water Resources, with a research focus in wildfire impacts on water quality. Since then, Carli has worked as a Water Resources and Resilience Management engineer at Carollo Engineers, using her skills in data science and modeling to develop water supply plans for municipalities, wildfire resilience and preparedness strategies, and climate change impact assessments.

Event Schedule

This online event meets on Thursday, March 12th at 4-5pm Eastern / 3-4pm Central / 1-2pm Pacific/Arizona.

**Gulf: Friday, March 13th at 12-1am**

Audience

This event is designed for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers looking for an introduction to fundamental academic professional development topics.

Registration

REGISTER NOW

This online event is open to the public. Once you register, you will automatically receive Zoom information for the session.

Accessibility

If you have access needs, please let us know what they are. Contact Zoe Zuleger (zmzuleger@wisc.edu), who is supporting this event, to let us know how we can help you have a successful experience. In addition to meeting individualized needs, we will also take measures throughout the event to support accessibility for all our students:

• Enabling live captioning in synchronous sessions
• Incorporating multiple modes of interaction into synchronous sessions

About CIRTL Programming

CIRTL Network programming is designed to develop future faculty committed to implementing and advancing evidence-based teaching practices to create undergraduate educational experiences that are accessible to all learners. Participants can explore our programming in any order, and to whatever extent supports your own teaching development needs and interests. To help participants understand what they can expect across all our programming, all CIRTL programming aligns with four broad learning goals; within those goals, programming might provide participants with an introductory, intermediate, or advanced learning experience.

This course supports the following CIRTL learning goals at an introductory level:

• Goal 4: Prepare for an impactful career. See more Goal 4 programming.