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STEM Career Panel

Panel of speakers for WiSTEM Career Panel in Fong Auditorium

The Navigating Careers in STEM is an annual panel discussion followed by a networking session featuring women in STEM who highlight their successes and challenges navigating careers in various STEM disciplines hosted in collaboration with Harvard College Women’s Center and the Office of Career Services.

Last Year's Panel

2021 Virtual Career Panel; Next-Gen & The natural World: Exploring STEM Careers & Environmental Justice; April Wickersham - April Wickersham is a part of the Nuclear Operations team supporting the Nuclear Science Division at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The Nuclear Science Division provides solutions to some of the world's most complex environmental and radiological challenges. Prior to joining PNNL, Wickersham spent 12 years in the 300 Area at the Hanford Site deactivating and stabilizing nuclear facilities. During her career, she moved from a Field Engineering position supporting operations and demolition to the Building Manager of a Cat. II Nuclear Facility managing a high-profile clean-up operation. Wickersham holds a B.A. in Civil Engineering from Carroll College located in Helena, Montana. Caro Park - A native of Whippany, New Jersey, I received my undergraduate at Harvard where I studied the effects of maternal malnutrition on fetal development at the Cowan Laboratory of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. An avid traveler, I've also worked on various humanitarian projects throughout Southeast Asia and southern Africa. Upon graduation, I received the Fulbright Anne Wexler Scholarship that supported my move to Melbourne, where I began my research on the intersection of climate change and public health, specifically focusing on how vulnerable populations respond to climate-influenced food insecurity. I am now back at Harvard and continuing my research in planetary health -- or the study of how we shape the health of the world, and how the world shapes the health of us. Cheryl Calaustro - From humble begginings as a zookeeper, Cheryl is an independent conservation biologist with 25 years of program administration experience in the field of environmental education. Natural resource protection, endangered species recovery and community development have been the focus of her work in the Pacific, Central America, the Caribbean and the US. Winin Micronesia, she established relationships with a broad range of stakeholders to garner local community support for conservation projects by increasing knowledge to improve attitudes and change behaviors to combat threats they face in their environment. By designing and implementing targeted communication strategies, she has helped communities and marginalized groups obtain tangible, effective, maintainable results by incorporating local knowledge and solutions with contemporary media. Working with entities that include the US Fish & Wildlife Service, National Audubon Society, Rare and the UN, she has supported a variety of social marketing programs that addressed daily operational needs to sustain community outreach and education programs. Yayuan Liu - Yayuan Liu earned her Ph.D. in 2019 from Stanford University in the department of Materials Science and Engineering, supported by the Stanford Graduate Fellowship. During her graduate study, she poineered a series of materials design methodologies to tackle the challenges of lithium metal anode for next-generation batteries, and fundamentally correlated the physiochemical properties of the elecroge-eletrolyte interface with lithium deposition behavior using advanced characterization techniques. Yayuan is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in the department of Chemical Engineering at MIT. She is developing redox-active sorbents and stimuli-responsive gas gating membranes for electrochemically-mediated carbon dioxide separation. Yayuan has received multiple awards for her research, including the ACS Division of Inorganic Chemistry Young Investigator Award, the MRS Graduate Student Gold Award, and Forbes 30 under 30 in science. Yayuan is also passionate about science communication and is a MIT Chemical Engineering Communication Lab Fellow. Yvette Gonzalez - Yvette is a Bioastronautics Researcher, Spacesuit Technician, and Human Resilience expert (Humanitarian). With over 22 years of International Development, Humanitarian, & Disaster Response experience rebuilding communities in active war, conflict, natural disasters, and epidemiological outbreaks, she now focuses on space technologies that are solving some of Earth's challenges. She carries out her research and is the Executinve Vice President of Strategic Partnership at the International Institute for Aeronautical Science (IIAS). Yvette is of Native American and Mexican heritage and is a member fo the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) as well as International Astronautical Federation (IAF). the Lunar Exploratory Analysis Group (LEAG), and Women in International Security (WIIS). While she currently pursues her Applied Astronautics Certificate at the IIAS, she holds an MPH in Forced Migration and the Epidemiology of HIV/AIDS from Columbia University, BA from St. Mary's University, and Deuxieme & Troisieme degrees from the Universite des Sciences Humaines in Strasbourg, France.