MFS Community Members Gather for Alumnae Women in STEM Panel
MFS students in Grades 8-12 joined parents, faculty, and staff members on May 18 for an evening panel discussion and Q&A with six MFS alumnae, all of whom work in STEM fields. The guest speakers discussed their work and answered questions posed by the audience in the Zoom chat.
Examples of student questions included:
- “How/when did you decide what particular STEM path you wanted to follow?”
- “What activities did you do at MFS that helped you in your major?”
- “Being a female in these male-popular careers, have you ever been discouraged? What about as a woman of color?”
- “I’ve heard that the course load for engineering is especially rigorous; how did you balance that with a social life and with jobs/internships?”
The biographies of the panelists are as follows:
Sarah Connell ’09 is a manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers. After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh where she double majored in accounting and business management, Sarah earned a master’s from St. Joseph’s University in health care administration, concentrating in health care informatics and systems. She is also a licensed Certified Public Accountant.
Jennielle Jobson ’07 studied chemical engineering at Penn, and then earned her Ph.D. at New York’s Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai. She is now working in the pharmaceutical field, communicating to physicians about new cancer drugs.
Michelle Marinucci Niewood ’01 is currently a Senior Director and Clinical Scientist at Genmab, in Princeton, an international biotechnology company developing cancer antibody therapies. She attended undergrad at Lafayette College, and went on to earn an M.S. in Public Health from Thomas Jefferson University, where she is also pursuing doctoral studies in Population Health Science.
Emily Purcell ’13 attended Bucknell University where she studied chemical engineering. Today, she is a specialist in quality operations at Merck, and is working in the area of vaccine development. She is also working towards an M.S. in biochemistry at Villanova.
Simone Stanley ’13 graduated from Howard University with a degree in chemical engineering; last year, she earned an M.S. from Georgetown University in biotechnology and entrepreneurship. She is currently a business development and marketing associate at PathSensors, a biotechnology company in the Baltimore area.
Shou-Li Tung ’12 attended Ursinus College where she majored in biology; she is now a third year medical student at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University.