Dr. Zechao Shang came to the University in 2016 as a postdoctoral scholar after obtaining his Ph.D. degree at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focused on databases, spanning from traditional query optimization to large-scale data processing. He is now happily working at a (not very) small company Snowflake Inc., after a pandemic ruined his academic job hunting. Feeling missing school, he signed up as an adjunct assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science and enjoyed part-time teaching before relocating to Washington.

Christine received her PhD in 2012 from the Chemistry Department at The University of Chicago. She worked in the Mazziotti group developing and implementing computational models to predict electronic behavior in highly correlated systems. She continued on to complete a postdoctoral research program — also in the field of Theoretical Chemistry. This research built and honed her programming and technical problem solving skills. Encouraged by others who made the transition away from Academia, Christine explored and pursued opportunities in software engineering. She has been applying her skills as a software engineer for the past 7 years and has been enjoying the wide range of problems she works on.