PTAC Membership
Bryan Owens Bryson is a 5th year graduate student in the biological engineering department, and a 9th year MIT student. He came to MIT from Houston, TX where he originally planned on coming to college, studying EECS, and then starting a video game company after graduating. Events took a much different path because MIT afforded Bryan the opportunity to realize a number of different potential futures including the one he is currently exploring. While lab and academics have been a critical feature of his MIT experience, through my time at MIT, he has participated in a number of activities and groups that have allowed him to interact with MIT’s greatest resource, the people.
To Bryan, MIT is a bastion of knowledge and a superpower in the creative potential of hard work.
Jonté Craighead is a native of Rocky Mount, a small rural town in Virginia, and the first in his family to attend a four-year university. As a freshman at MIT, he chose Civil Engineering in order to obtain a broad-based education in engineering and to develop the skills necessary to apply systems thinking to society’s most challenging problems. Post-MIT, his plans currently include working with businesses and governments to most effectively utilize technology in their operations. Thus far, he has been involved in a number of groups on campus, but has found his time with the Undergraduate Association and Tech Catholic Community to be most rewarding. As a member of the Presidential Transition Advisory Cabinet, he hopes not only to represent student opinion, but to leverage that opinion in providing actionable recommendations to the President as he steps into his new role.
Aalap Dighe is a Ph.D. candidate in the Mechanical Engineering department at MIT. He received his B.S. from Purdue University in 2009 and S.M. from MIT in 2011, both in Mechanical Engineering. He works in the Biological Microtechnology and BioMEMS group, where he is currently designing a closed-loop neural interface MEMS device. Aalap has been actively involved in the MIT student community through the Graduate Student Council (GSC). After serving as a GSC departmental representative for a few months, Aalap was elected the 2010 Orientation Chair, where he helped organize MIT’s graduate student orientation, the largest student-run graduate orientation in the country. In 2011-12, Aalap served as the graduate student representative on the MIT Faculty Policy Committee (FPC), a very high profile Institute Committee. He is currently the vice-president of the GSC.
Alex Ghaben is a rising senior at MIT (class of 2013). Hailing from a small town, Alex found MIT to be quite a change from her small town of York, Pa. Upon entering, she found herself overwhelmed with all of the new and unique opportunities at MIT and eventually found herself gravitating towards medically related activities such as MIT MedLinks – leading Alex to declare her courses of study as Chemical Biological Engineering and Biology. After graduation, she hopes to pursue a career in medicine or clinical research. In her free time, Alex enjoys music, art, running, and traveling.
Angela E. Kilby is a PhD student in the MIT Department of Economics, where she is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She is also co-founder of Adherean Inc., an MIT-fostered startup that joins behavioral economics and biochemical engineering to address low global rates of medication adherence. She is an incoming Graduate Resident Tutor at Senior House.
Prior to graduate school, Ms. Kilby worked as an economist for the Jameel Poverty Action Lab, with postings in Indonesia (at the World Bank) and Sierra Leone. She was a 2007-2008 Luce Scholar in Indonesia, working as an economist at a non-profit research foundation. She also worked in India during summer 2007, sponsored by MIT-India, and spent her junior year at the London School of Economics. She speaks Indonesian fluently.
As an MIT undergraduate, Ms. Kilby was actively involved in the leadership of her living group, pika, and remains active in the alumni association, Housecorp, as its current President. She also rowed varsity crew, played flute in MITWE, and was co-inventor of XoutTB, which won the Lemelson-MIT prize in the 2007 IDEAS Competition.
Catherine Olsson is a 6-3 and 9 double major, currently working on her M.Eng. thesis in artificial intelligence with Patrick Winston. She lived for four years at Random Hall and now lives off campus. Over the past four years, she has been involved with student engagement and campus politics in a variety of capacities, including the UA Senate, the UA Finance Board, the UA Restructuring Committee, the Institute Subcommittee on the HASS Requirement, and the Random Hall executive committee. Other extracurricular passions of hers include doing community service with Alpha Phi Omega (a co-ed, non-residential community service fraternity), teaching and tutoring, singing, and tabletop roleplaying. She is excited to work with President Reif to explore student issues and to gather and incorporate student perspective as the goals and direction of the new administration take shape.
Eduardo Russian was raised in San Diego, CA but is of Mexican and Venezuelan descent. His parents were immigrants, and he is a first generation college student. Eduardo will be entering his senior year here at MIT as a 2A with Product Design major. He has also declared a minor in Management and a minor in History Theory and Criticism (HTC) of Art and Architecture. As a result of his HTC minor, he is cross-enrolled with Wellesley College. In his time at MIT he has worked closely with residential life through the FSILG office as well as with different minority groups on campus. He is currently president of his living group, Theta Delta Chi, and has served on several advisory committees, like SACDA, the CAC Student Advisory Committee, and the FSILG Strategic Planning Committee. In the past few years Eduardo has also held different jobs both around campus and throughout New England. He has worked as a Tech Caller, at Sloan in the Technology Services office, at Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut, and now at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in their Boston office.
Brian Spatocco is a fourth year PhD student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Prior to MIT he received his B.S. in Materials Science Engineering from Rutgers University and his M.Phil. in Nanotechnology Enterprise from the University of Cambridge with the support of a Gates-Cambridge Scholarship and Tau Beta Pi National Record Fellowship. Besides his current position as President of the Graduate Student Council, Brian has served as Chair of the Housing and Community Affairs Committee (HCA) for two years, Chair of the Halls at Sidney-Pacific Graduate Residence, and Vice Chair of the Muddy Charles Board of Governors. Outside of MIT, he has served as a national advocate and lobbyist for higher education, an invited and keynote speaker at several student leadership conferences, and a residential leader both within MIT and in the local Cambridge neighborhood. For fun, he enjoys traveling to food markets in foreign countries, hosting dinner parties, and bartending.