Ph.D. Connections Career Conference Career Panel: Consulting

Panelists will share insights about the business challenges they take on in their consulting roles. The session will speak to what is required to uncover solutions for clients, the skills drawn upon to address issues, and the approaches used to solve complex problems. You will gain a better sense of how advanced degrees from a myriad of fields may translate to the consulting arena.

Panelists

Lydia Atangcho is a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) where she focuses on strategy development for social sector and private sector clients in education and healthcare. Prior to joining BCG, she completed a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan, where she studied therapeutic peptides for intracellular drug targets. Lydia recently moved to Seattle where she did a one-year externship at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on their post-secondary education team. In her free time, Lydia enjoys hiking and backpacking in the Pacific Northwest, lounging at home with her partner and two dogs, as well as baking, cooking, cycling, gardening, and traveling.

Colette Johnson is director of strategy and operations at Ithaka S+R (Strategy and Research), a New-York based, not-for-profit research and consulting firm that studies higher education. In her role, she provides leadership and support for mission-critical operational and strategic projects. Since 2021, she has served as a professor of practice for the Calhoun Honors Discovery Program at Virginia Tech, where she worked with a junior honors seminar focused on increasing access to quality education for incarcerated students. Colette received her Ph.D. in English from Princeton University and holds bachelor’s degrees in English and art history from the University of California, Irvine.

Neill Mohammad (Ph.D. in Political Science, 2012) is a project director with more than 11 years of experience consulting hospitals on pharmacy cost reduction opportunities, retail and specialty pharmacy revenue growth, and regulatory compliance issues related to federal drug discount programs targeted at safety-net providers. In addition to his healthcare consulting experience, Neill has previously run for Congress in Illinois’ 16th District and served on the DeKalb County, Illinois Board. He is currently leading a comprehensive performance-improvement engagement with a four-hospital system in southern Illinois, where he is working with a client CEO, CFO, and COO to deliver roughly $25 million in recurring annual financial benefit.

Registration is required at https://myumi.ch/n7D55.

We want to ensure full and equitable participation in our events. If an accommodation would promote your full participation in this event, please follow the registration link to indicate your accommodation requirements. Please let us know as soon as possible in order to have adequate time, preferably one week, to arrange for your requested accommodations or an effective alternative.