Career Panel
Click here for the WiDSEL2019 Agenda (PDF).
Technical and professional training at the undergraduate-/graduate-level to become a data scientist.
Making the transition from an academic researcher (grad-student/postdoc) to a data scientist in industry/government/academia.
Things that departments/programs can do close the gap; Things trainees can do to in the face of the current gap.
- Sonja Fritzsche (German Studies)
- Yue Qi (CHEMS)
- Ashley Shade (MMG)
- Angela Wilson (Chemistry)
Professor
German Studies
Associate Dean of Personnel, Administration, & Undergraduate Education
College of Arts & Letters
Michigan State University
Email | Webpage
As Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University, Sonja Fritzsche works with the Dean to support Chairs and Program Directors in the area of innovative undergraduate curricular initiatives and personnel. Most significantly, the implementation of the Culture of Care initiative, evaluation procedures, College-wide administrator and faculty development initiatives, and creating habits of diversity, equity, and inclusion across the College. People first. From staff, to part-time lecturer, to student, to pre-tenure, to full professor and even those administrators.
A Professor of German Studies with a past dual appointment in an International Studies program, Sonja's interests are inherently global and interdisciplinary. Her work has focused on literary history and film in the area of utopian/dystopian studies and comparative science fiction of the Cold War. Recently, she co-edited Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East with Anindita Banerjee (2018). Current interests include the future of AI in teaching and learning, women in leadership in higher education, and recent portrayals of fascism in science fiction/dystopian media. Dr. Fritzsche serves as the Vice President of the Science Fiction Research Association 2019-2022 and to host the Society for Utopian Studies conference 2019 in East Lansing from October 17-19, 2019. She was a Professor of German and Eastern European Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University from 2001-2015.
Professor, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Associate Dean for Inclusion & Diversity
College of Engineering
Michigan State University
Email | Webpage
Professor Yue Qi is the Associate Dean for Inclusion and Diversity in the College of Engineering and a professor in the Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Department at Michigan State University. Professor Qi received her B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering and Computer Science from Tsinghua University in 1996 and her Ph.D. in Materials Science with a minor in Computer Science from Caltech in 2001. Shen spent the next 12 years working at the Chemical Sciences and Materials Systems Lab, General Motors R&D Center. At GM, she developed multi-scale models starting from atomistic level to solve engineering problems related to lightweight alloys, fuel cells, and batteries. She transitioned from industry to academia in 2013 and built the “Materials Simulation for Clean Energy” Lab at MSU. She has published more than 120 publications and holds 3 patents. She was a co-recipient of 1999 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology for Theoretical Work for her Ph.D. work; received three GM Campbell awards for fundamental research on various topics while working in GM; and won the 2017 Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS) Brimacombe Medalist Award for her contributions in multidisciplinary computational materials science, from groundbreaking work on chemical- mechanical coupling to breakthroughs in understanding Li-ion battery failure.
Assistant Professor
Microbiology and Molecular Genetics
Plant Soil and Microbial Sciences, Plant Resilience Institute
Program in Ecology Evolutionary Biology and Behavior
Michigan State University
Email | Webpage
Ashley Shade received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin Microbiology Doctoral Training Program in 2010, and afterwards was a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation postdoctoral fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation at Yale University. In 2014, she started her position in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Michigan State University. In her research program, she seeks to understand the resilience of microbial communities (microbiomes). Resilience is the capacity of a system to recover after it has been altered by a disturbance. Her lab employs ‘omics tools with both field and laboratory studies. She has funded research on microbial ecology in extreme environments, plant-microbiome interactions and coupled resilience, and how microbial interactions support resilience. She is member of the International Society for Microbial Ecology, the Ecological Society for America, and the American Society for Microbiology. She serves as an editor at the American Society for Microbiology journal mSystems and Ecology Letters.
Shade is an advocate of reproducible research and open science, and her lab’s analysis workflows are on GitHub. In addition, Shade has developed a popular workshop on microbial metagenome analysis (edamamecourse.org). She also cares deeply about mentoring and teaching: she applies trainee-focused Radical Candor in her mentoring style and Scientific Teaching (teaching-as-research) in her classroom.
Dr. Shade is the parent of two active, young children, ages 2 and 5, and her daughter has special needs. Her spouse is also on the tenure track (even in the same department!). She has a pet dog and a tortoise, and enjoys walking the dog and reading.
John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of Chemistry
Chemistry
College of Natural Sciences
Michigan State University
Email | Webpage
Angela K. Wilson is the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Michigan State University, and also has affiliations with the Department of Physics and Department of Computer Science and Engineering. From 2016-2018, she served a rotation as the Director (Head) of the Division of Chemistry at the U.S. National Science Foundation, responsible for a $250M budget and strategic investments in research across the nation. Prior to this, she was the Associate Vice Provost for Faculty, Regents Professor, and Founder and Director of the Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Modeling at the University of North Texas.
Among her national and international honors are Fellow of the American Chemical Society, Fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), National Associate of the National Academies, International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) Distinguished Woman in Chemistry, and the Wilfred T. Doherty Award. She was awarded the 2015 Francis P. Garvan-John M. Olin Medal, the highest award in chemistry dedicated to women, which recognizes research, leadership, and service. In October 2018, she was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame. She is Past-President of the IUPAC Division of Physical and Biophysical Chemistry and Chair-Elect of the Chemistry Section of the AAAS. She has published over 160 papers, and has edited four books including Pioneers in Quantum Chemistry.