Law & Policy
MYRICK ’09
Svante Myrick’s ’09 placement on 30 Under 30 follows an election cycle that put him in the national spotlight. As the mayor of the city of Ithaca, he campaigned for Hillary Clinton and was recently named as Director of Youth Leadership Programs at People for the American Way — a liberal think-tank. As mayor, Myrick closed a $3 million deficit that he inherited and earned resounding support from Ithacans, winning 89 percent of the vote in his reelection in 2016. He also attracted controversy with his supervised heroin injection facility proposal last year. In response to his national fame, Myrick has stated that he remains committed to his job as mayor.
Marketing & Advertising
RAHMAN ’09
A Cornell drop out and former Sun Arts and Entertainment writer, Aniq Rahman ’09 is now president of Moat, a London analytics and intelligence company focused on digital advertising. The company raised $67.5 million in capital and has approximately 230 employees. Before Moat, Rahman was CEO of Instinctiv, a company that was acquired by SoundCloud in 2012.
Enterprise Technology
KIANG M.Eng. ’16
Originally a humanities major at Wellesley College, Charlotte Kiang M.Eng. ’16 gained an affinity for engineering as a NASA intern. Upon graduating college, Kiang pivoted to science and enrolled at International Space University. She then pursued a M.Eng. at Cornell, where she was also a research assistant at the bioastronautics and human performance lab. She is now a mission integration engineer at SpaceX.
Healthcare
O’ROURKE grad
Currently a M.D.-Ph.D. student at Weill Cornell Medical College’s tri-institution program, Kevin O’Rourke grad focuses his research on understanding colorectal cancer. In 2015, he spent the fall semester at Cornell Tech and also published a paper in Cell demonstrating that a specific gene causes gene colon cancer in mice. His work was deemed the top discovery of the year by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he currently works.
Healthcare
OTTE ’11
Gabriel Otte ’11 is CEO and co-founder of Freenome, a company that has developed a blood test to screen for multiple types of cancer by looking for changes in DNA fragments over time, according to Forbes. As a chemistry major, Otte researched microvascular diseases and Alzheimer’s disease at Cornell.
Healthcare
DE SILVA ’11
After graduating from Cornell with a B.S. in Applied Economics and Management, Matthew De Silva ’11 worked as an analyst in the finance industry. However, when his father was diagnosed with a brain tumor, De Silva raised $7 million dollars and founded Notable Labs in 2014. Oncologists can send tumor samples to the lab, where thousands of drug combinations are tested and results are sent back to physicians within a few days. Currently, Notable Labs is exclusively focused on providing personalized medical testing for brain cancer.
Healthcare
RAJ
A postdoc in molecular biology and genetics, Srilakshmi Raj’s rise has been meteoric. As the youngest awardee of the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, Raj earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge after earning her B.A. at Oxford. At Cornell, Raj studies variation in the human genome, but she concurrently serves as a visiting scholar at Penn’s genetics department and as an adjunct professor at the Center for Human Genetics in India.
Art and Style
CURTIS ’09
Daughter of famed designer Jill Stuart, Morgan Curtis ’09 has been immersed in the fashion industry. After Cornell, she worked as the Associate Designer and Director of Fabrics for Jill Stuart International and as a designer in Solid and Striped before starting her own line. In 2014, Curtis founded the lingerie brand Morgan Lane, which is currently sold online and in department stores such as Harrods and Le Bon Marche.
Art and Style
SHEPSMAN ’10
In 2014, Amy Shepsman ’10 founded Flaca Jewelry — the only jewelry company named in Forbes 30 Under 30. Since then, Flaca has expanded to over 45 stores across the country and been featured in publications such as Vogue, InStyle and Elle. Shepsman has partnered with notable retailers including Toni Hacker of Thacker NYC and was named “Best New Designer from 2015” by Refinery29 and The Zoe Report.
Energy
ALFARO ’10
Even while he was still at Cornell, Michael Alfaro ’10 was already involved with energy as a participant in the Solar Decathlon — an international competition hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy to build and market a house run exclusively on solar energy. After a few years in the finance industry with UBS and Morgan Stanley, Alfaro joined Zimmer Partners, a hedge fund focused on the oil and gas sector; he is now head of exploration and production investing at Zimmer.
Finance
CRAIB ’12
Through crowdsourcing in 2015, Richard Craib ’12 founded the quant hedge fund Numerai in collaboration with data scientists to develop machine-learning models for stock market predictions. The fund also created the world’s first encrypted data science tournament, which rewards participants with bitcoin. Numerai’s work with global equity strategy is backed by Peter Diamandis, Renaissance Technologies cofounder Howard Morgan and Union Square Ventures.
Venture Capital
STRANDBERG ’10
While at Cornell, Caitlin Strandberg ’10 co-founded Slope Media Group, Cornell’s student internet media group and majored in history. Strandberg previously worked with the investment team at Flybridge Capital Partners and joined FirstMark Capital after graduating from Harvard Business School in 2016. As Vice President at FirstMark, she focuses on sourcing new investments as well as supporting the FirstMark platform.
Manufacturing & Industry
BLUM ’12
With three patents and two Cornell degrees — a B.S. and M.Eng — his name, Jeremy Blum ’12 has a knack for innovation. In 2009, Blum built a robot that could play Guitar Hero with 99 percent accuracy. After graduating from Cornell, Blum became a lead electrical systems engineer at GoogleX, a position that involved prototyping on Google Glass. Blum maintains a YouTube channel and a blog, where he documented his five years as a Cornellian.
Retail and Ecommerce
IZEN ’13
Steven Izen’s ’13 journey to become the founder and CEO of Lokai began with a simple message, one which propelled him onto Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Retail and Ecommerce. “Lokahi” in Hawaiian means “unity and to blend opposites.” Adhering to this mantra, Izen’s company aimed to promote balance in people’s lives. Its first product was a bracelet made of black and white beads.
Education
BAIGELMAN ’09
Louise Baigelman ’09 was honored in the Forbes’ 30 under 30 list for her innovative and entrepreneurial digital library. As a college graduate working for Teach for America, Baigelman recognized a prevalent problem in low-income schools: students both struggled with reading and dreaded it. Therefore, she co-founded “Story Shares” — a digital library that provides age appropriate reading materials to lower level students, aiming to get them excited about literature — Baigelman’s efforts have reached students in 44 states and 26 countries, according to Forbes.