This is the first meeting of the weekly professional development seminar. We are going to go over some employment statistics, both on the national level and in the specific case of our department, to see what sort of jobs people with a math Ph.D. end up taking.

Nissim graduated from Stony Brook in 2017, and her thesis was about algebraic methods used in topology and how they are connected to statistical functions. She worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Lafayette College until recently, when she started working as a computational biology post-doc at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. Her work involves mathematical analysis of genetic data from normal and tumor cells in cancer patients. The research heavily uses statistics and probability theory, but certain amounts of geometrical and topological insights are also valuable. Nissim will talk about the experiences of working at a liberal arts college and about transitioning from mathematical to computational biology research.

The first part of a "mini-workshop" about giving short talks. This week, we discuss the principles of giving a good short talk (through a series of short videos), and let everyone choose a topic for a 5-minute talk, to be delivered next week.

This time, we are going to watch a very instructive (and very entertaining) video lecture by computer scientist Simon Peyton Jones, titled "How to give a great research talk". I got a lot of good ideas from this talk myself, and I dare say you will, too. You could watch it on your own, but it will be more fun doing it together.

$\hspace {5mm}$Lilia Tsalenko, http://www.linkedin.com/in/liliamt, has over 25 years of professional experience, with 13+ years as the founder and CEO of Elti Solutions, a Global Talent Search and Recruiting Company. She joined Blockstream in September of 2017, a company pioneering advancements in cryptography and blockchain technology, as Head of Talent Acquisition and is working on scaling the global team over the next year. Before that, Lilia worked for 10+ years as a Software Engineer for many companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.
$\hspace {5mm}$In the seminar, Lilia is going to talk a little bit about her career path and explain how finding a job in the tech sector looks like from the point of view of a recruiter. She will also draw on her experience to offer career advice for math PhD's.

Adam Azzam directs the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence programs at Insight in New York City. Insight runs a free 7-week Fellowship program for people transitioning into data careers by partnering with over 300 cutting-edge teams across the US and Canada. Scientists identified from over 10,000 applicants a year are selected to join the Insight Fellowship where they build new skills through collaborative learning and go on to thriving careers. In this session, Adam will talk about his transition to data science and share the lessons learned by his organization after mentoring nearly 2000 fellow PhDs over the last 6 years. Before joining Insight, Adam completed his PhD in Math at UCLA specializing in harmonic analysis and dispersive PDEs.

Professors Chris Bishop, Raanan Schul, and Jason Starr will briefly discuss their own career trajectories with an emphasis on "weathering the storm". Particular questions that they will discuss are dealing with mistakes, being stuck, coping with difficult collaborators, discovering a problem is much harder than previously thought, etc. Most of the time will be used (we hope) by questions from the audience.

We will present the problem of interest rate modeling as a stochastic evolution of the so-called “yield curve” in a functional space. Some existence results will be presented by Zeyu Cao, who is preparing a PhD on this topic. I will also give a broad view of some mathematical challenges in finance and how they can face practical applications. Finally I will open the discussion on possible careers in quantitative finance.

Elizabeth Russell graduated from Boston University in 2009, working under Bob Devaney. After graduating, she did a postdoc at the United States Military Academy (West Point) and then moved into a tenure-track position at Western New England University. After a year, she transitioned to the NSA where she has been for the past 5 years. Now she works in the Research Directorate as a member of the data science research group.

During this talk, Liz will discuss employment opportunities for mathematicians and statisticians at the NSA and what it's like to work for the government doing secret math. She will also talk about the roundabout path she took getting here (including the day she decided to leave academia).