Georgia Papathomas Remarks

I would like to welcome all graduate alumni and graduate students to todays’ special event.

When Dean Boyce asked me to give the keynote speech, I started retracing my years from the time I was a student at Columbia through an almost 40-year career, to now.

As I was recalling the meandering pathway of my career, I thought of my favorite Greek poem, by Cavafy, titled Ithaka. The poem was inspired by Homer’s Odyssey.

I want to share just a few verses of the poem with you. I hope by the end of my talk you will understand why.

The poem reads,

“As you set out for Ithaka
Hope the voyage is a long one
Full of adventure, full of discovery,……
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for
But do not hurry the journey at all
Better if it lasts for years so you are old by the time you reach the island
Wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
Not expecting Ithaka to make you rich

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey
Without her you would not have set out. ”

I set out for my journey to my Ithaka at the age of 17 when I came to the U.S. to study. When I arrived at Columbia, I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Columbia was everything I expected and more. I enrolled in the department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics because I wanted to learn how to build bridges. To me, every time I saw a bridge, I saw a giant piece of art connecting two worlds.

The first year I immersed myself in my studies. There was a lot of work to do, but most importantly for me at the time, I wanted to keep my mind busy to soften the pain I felt from being so far away from my family and friends.

I was the only woman in my class, but my classmates never made me feel unwelcomed. Of course, there were plenty of awkward moments, but no bad memories. And even though my parents had raised me to believe that men and women have equal potential, I still felt the need to prove I deserved to be there, especially because at the time our grades were posted next to our names for all to see!

Quickly I realized that the biggest strength of Columbia was the community. Its faculty, administration, and students. I was lucky to take courses from professors who were giants in their fields, like Professor Harris, Professor Salvadori, Professor Wing, Professor Shinozuka, and Professor DiMaggio to mention just a few. I do not think I fully appreciated how important they were in their fields; I just knew they were wonderful teachers.

My classmates came from all around the world, and were truly smart. That made discussions and collaborations interesting and fun. My study group was made up of four classmates: one from Nigeria, one from China who had spent high school in Ghana, an American, and myself from Greece. Four continents represented in our small group of four.

Even though I focused my studies in the department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, I took every opportunity to attend courses whether for credit or not in the other departments like Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Operations Research, and Architecture.

After my Bachelor’s degree, I started being more interested in the fundamentals of engineering and I was swept up by the new wave of computers and algorithms. Professor Eskin, a young electrical engineering professor, gave inspiring lectures on mathematical modeling and the new ways of solving engineering problems using computers. We would spend hours after class talking about the possibilities of solving equations using software and you could see the excitement painted on our faces.

For my PhD I decided to use numerical methods, writing my own algorithm and computer program to solve elasto-plasticity phenomena in nuclear reactor vessels.

We all know that Columbia was and remains a world for learning and discovery. Beyond the classroom there is the campus and beyond the campus there is The City.

I recall with nostalgia musicians, comedians and actors playing at the sundial, long discussions with classmates at the steps of Low Library, long days and nights at the Engineering and Butler Library, dinners at V&T and Tom’s Restaurant, weekend picnics at Riverside Park, going downtown to attend plays and concerts with inexpensive student tickets.

What makes a Columbia Engineering education different and unique is the emphasis on a well-rounded education that helps you build a strong foundation, not only in engineering but also in math, physics, literature and art. A wholistic approach to learning. How can I ever forget Contemporary Civilization at Columbia!!

The value of the strong foundation I built at Columbia became obvious as I navigated my career through the many challenges I faced and the opportunities I grasped whenever I drew new paths in my career.

Columbia, both in class and out, educates us to think, wonder, explore, and it builds our confidence to tackle new challenges.

We learned to envision and discover new things. With continuous learning, persistence, and perseverance we survived the early days of our research when we felt everything had been discovered and there was nothing new we could come up with.

It was in school that I learned to never underestimate the value of a great advisor, mentor, and classmate. I realized that it took more than just myself to succeed.

Columbia gave me a strong, deep and broad foundation of knowledge, it opened doors of new opportunities and the confidence to try new things.

On a personal level, I met my wonderful husband at Columbia and a few dear friends who today are like family.

My first job after Columbia University was at AT&T Bell Labs in the pure research area. It was totally intimidating. Having giants in the field as professors is very different than having giants in the field as colleagues. Just like Columbia there were very few women in Research and there were none in my department.

I was aware that my education opened the door of opportunity for me. It was up to me now to use that Columbia education to succeed.

I joined the Solid-state Physics department where I continued to work on the use of algorithms and computers to solve physical problems. The physics this time were quantum physics and the problems were related to submicron semiconductor devices, beyond silicon, to design and develop high-speed computers.

Those were the times we wrote our own code. There were no widely available commercial software packages. My research expanded to include signal processing and systems engineering with applications in new communication networks. It was the height of wireless and the beginning of cable networks and the internet.

One of my unique assignments was a joint four-year collaboration between Bell Labs and IBM, managing a research group assigned to develop novel algorithms to design and detect submarines for the U.S. Navy.

In 1990, I was assigned, along with a team of scientists and engineers at Bell Labs, to review the progress of science and technology up to 1990 and envision how the new communication networks would be used in 2000 and beyond. The project was called Service Net 2000.

We envisioned high-performance computers and global high-speed voice, video, data, and mobile networks that would allow scientists and businesses to collaborate across continents, hundreds of TV channels and entertainment on demand, and kids separated by thousands of miles playing games together. Wireless networks would finally free people to work in any place they choose untethered to the desk.

Even though at the time we were breaking boundaries, our wildest ideas did not come close to the breadth and speed of progress that we are witnessing today.

I loved working at Bell Labs. Bell Labs was like a university without having to apply for grants! I was happy and I was not looking for change.

But you know what they say about the inevitability of change, and indeed change did come. After about 10 years at Bell labs I was placed on the “fast track,” an AT&T program that accelerated career development to move quickly up the management ladder to senior management positions on the Business side.

My director saw something in me that I had not seen. A career in the Technology Business. It was an opportunity I felt it was worth pursuing.

The move was nerve-wracking. I was moving to a new world. Excited and scared. I started in Mergers and Acquisitions. A certificate in M&A from Wharton helped me learn the basics. While I knew the technology, I was learning the Business aspects of M&A.

Next, I ran Strategy for the Network Business. Again, setting business strategy you need to understand the markets and the customers. A summer at Harvard helped me learn the fundamentals of Strategic Marketing.

My career was progressing well, primarily focused on the communications business, and specifically on technology-based products, both hardware and software.

And then another turn. My next assignment was in Operations. I ran AT&T’s High-speed Data Network. A large 700-member organization across the U.S. managing a “best effort” data network. The technology was new and the technical problems endless. But it offered new capabilities to businesses to connect their computer networks and the cost was low.

At Bell Labs I worked with extremely capable scientists and I saw the benefit of strong teams with complementary skills. There was true respect for each other’s capabilities.

In my new assignment I had to restructure a large organization and hire a new leadership team. The advice I was given when I was first promoted back at Bell Labs, had proven valuable throughout my career.

The advice was that a good manager has a strong team. I was told a good manager should seek to hire strong diverse leaders with skills even better than their own. The job of the manager is to help them succeed.

Have empathy and connect with your team and your colleagues, and understand the purpose and goals of the whole Business you are part of. That was exactly what I did then--and how I continued to manage and lead in the rest of my career.

And then in 2001, another off-road turn in my career. I was given an opportunity to move into the healthcare industry.

Health had become important in my life, having two aging parents and two young children. My husband and I were not too young either. The opportunity to work in healthcare gave a new meaning to my work. It was closer to “engineering for humanity,” just like our engineering motto.

When I joined Pfizer, I assumed the role of Chief Technology Officer in Europe, Middle East & Africa, including Russia. I had to consolidate the infrastructure and the organizations in 60 countries of two companies, Warner Lambert and Pharmacia, that were acquired by Pfizer.

I moved back to Europe, this time as an expat. Diversity had a different meaning. In each country where we had major IT operations we had to deal with different regulatory, legal, and labor requirements. I inherited a great leadership team and our work was done really well.

My staff meetings were interesting and fun to listen to. I had a team that was very well aligned on the goals and the plans of the business, but majorly disagreed when it came to European soccer teams.

Coming back to the US, I ran a global IT organization that interfaced with the different sectors of the business. This was the first assignment that I started to truly understand each of the functions in pharma from R&D to manufacturing to sales. Through the lens of this role, the connection of pharma to doctors and patients was much clearer.

Pharma was a latecomer into the digital world, long after the finance industry, and we saw a surge of IT activities to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. But no fundamental changes to the business.

At the time there were only a few visionaries who could connect the changes that were happening in healthcare with doctors, payers, and the government--fueled by social and economic pressures and the advancements in technology--to the changes that would be required in their business.

There was a growing middle class in emerging markets and an aging population in the developed markets. These social trends were increasing the need for healthcare and the costs for healthcare were becoming unsustainable.

We saw a slow shift of focus on therapy outcomes and value, by both governments and insurance companies. And, we saw increased patient engagement facilitated by the internet and the multiple search and collaboration platforms.

On the technology side, we saw breakthrough technologies maturing simultaneously and technology players targeting healthcare. We had a few “Silicon Valley” companies developing electronics that could improve health beyond the pill. Electronic chips that could be embedded into pills and wearable devices that could monitor therapies and help patients and doctors to improve outcomes.

Most importantly, we saw continuous breakthroughs in the field of genomics. The ten-year long Human Genome Project was completed in 2003. It is worth knowing that since then the cost of sequencing a human genome has been falling precipitously. In 2005 the cost of a whole genome sequence was $14 million. By 2012 it was close to $10,000, and today it is about $1,000. The cost curve was declining far faster than Moore’s law.

In 2008 I joined Boehringer Ingelheim as Chief Information Officer. What made this job different was that the chair of the board of managing directors was open and even eager to explore new digital technologies to improve therapies and outcomes and they were looking to me to work with them not only as the CIO but also as the lead for their efforts in digital health.

In 2011, I joined Johnson & Johnson as Chief Information Officer of the Group of the J&J Pharmaceutical Companies Globally.

Johnson & Johnson had the vision to become a science and technology company. I became a member of the Pharmaceutical Global Operating Committee, a small team which included the CEO and the senior executives from every function of the business.

It was clear to me very quickly that Johnson & Johnson was a different company than any other one I had yet worked for. The company’s business and culture were guided by their credo.

I did not only see a genuine commitment to patients and caregivers, but also to its employees and the communities they worked in. Johnson & Johnson focused on innovation and was willing to make the necessary investments and changes to accelerate their ability to bring medicine to market.

The motto was “ the patients are waiting.” As a global operating committee, we visited hospitals and research institutions in every continent. We visited countries with advanced and developing health systems, from Japan to Vietnam, from the UK to South Africa, from U.S. to Russia, and from Canada to Brazil. After many of those visits I would lay sleepless rethinking some of the awful hospital conditions I saw and images of patients would stay with me for weeks.

For me I was closing my circle back to Columbia. I finally felt I could connect the dots, between my knowledge and experiences in science, engineering, and technology to the needs of a pharma company and the patient. And I was with a company that I could take on challenges and push boundaries.

The technologies in mobile health, cloud computing, social media and high-performance computing had matured enough that progress and innovation were no longer hindered by the ability to collect and process data.

And now, data was becoming the new gold. Both structured and unstructured data from electronic medical records, insurance claims, and sensor data, to clinical data and omics.

Eric Topol, the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational institute, wrote a great book in 2011 on “The Creative Destruction of Medicine” and described how the intersection of technology and medicine could transform the delivery of healthcare.

By now it had become obvious to scientists and business leaders that there is enormous value in extracting the information and insights hidden in Big Data. Data had become a true business asset.

The transformational journey at Johnson & Johnson began with Pharma’s senior management call to action around the importance of data and analytics.

With my $1.2 billion dollar annual budget for technology and a global organization, I decided to reprioritize our spending in IT and make a serious investment in cloud and high-speed computing, mobility technologies, wearables, and data sciences.

A business, when it considers investing in breakthrough technology, is concerned about timing. It does not want to be too early and waste money or too late and miss the curve. It did not take much to convince my colleagues that the inflection point was just around the corner and we could not wait. But, I had to assume the risk of being wrong. This was 2011.

We made a serious investment and built a strong organization of data scientists and data engineers and also built a data warehouse with data from 700 million patient-lives.

The data sciences team became an integral part of every business function starting with R&D. In research the teams focused on understanding disease, both the disease development and the processes involved in disease progression. On the operations side the teams focused on improving clinical trials to bring medicine to patients faster.

In my second year at Johnson & Johnson, I more regularly connected with Columbia. I came back to attend lectures and get together with students and professors. Every time I attended an event, I came back inspired and with new ideas relevant to my work. I signed up Johnson & Johnson as an industry partner and explored opportunities to collaborate. Computer science and data science were the first and obvious areas of interest.

Big Data and data science in AI are holding the promise to disrupt and transform healthcare. We already see some of the benefits.

We see solutions that empowers patients to manage their own health, improvements in hospital productivity, a shift from fee for service to outcomes-based payments and breakthroughs in product innovation as well as reduction in the time required to bring new drugs and treatments to patients.

Johnson & Johnson was not unique in the use of Big Data and AI to augment our scientists’ knowledge and accelerate product innovation. Every forward-looking pharma company did the same. We were proud we started earlier.

And the investments paid off big with the pandemic. Vaccines from the lab to patients in one year for emergency use! Incredible.

Big Data and AI algorithms are being adapted not only by pharma but also by payers, providers, and regulators who are advancing their own analytics and data science capabilities.

But major risks remain. We are still lacking standards. Cleaning data to improve data accuracy remains an enormous task, and there are serious concerns about data bias, privacy, and security.

It was in 2016 that the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum coined the term “The Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

He said, and I quote. “We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. Big Data and artificial intelligence will shape job markets, customer expectations, and business profitability on a global scale. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.”

As you progress in your career continuous learning will be necessary.

Change will be the only constant.

But you do not have to do it alone. As I discovered again, Columbia remains a source of learning and support. Make Columbia an extension to the organization and industry you are part of. Our engineering school is a superpower in research and extremely effective at connecting diverse areas of research and practices across departments and schools. I strongly believe that diversity of thought unlocks innovation.

But I have not talked about diversity yet which was a career-long goal of mine. Throughout my career I wanted to learn and contribute. Every challenge I faced, I was scared and felt insecure but I was never so scared that I didn’t try. I was lucky to have a loving upbringing in a household that did not entertain different mental capabilities between men and women, a husband who often believed more in me than I did myself, and many allies, friends and mentors.

But early in my career I learned that every person is not as fortunate as I have been and that regardless of our foundation and background, we deal with biases, both conscious and unconscious, while working with and for people who discriminate and do not support equality.

Implicitly and explicitly, I have been an ear to hear horror stories throughout my career from female and minority colleagues and I saw too much first-hand, as well.

But even in good times, not having female colleagues felt a bit lonely and, most importantly, there were very few, if any, female and minority role models to look up to.

From these experiences, from my first years in the industry, I became a champion of diversity in all its forms.

Every organization I built, I ensured it was diverse, not only at the low levels of management but at the executive levels as well, and in every case, the representation of many varied voices has resulted in teams that thrived and exceled. There has been extensive research on diversity and the high human and business value it creates. It is hard to deny it anymore.

At Johnson & Johnson, I collaborated with two wonderful executives and established a program called STEM2D, to increase the number of women in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and math. Johnson & Johnson funded the program with millions of dollars. The program had three pillars. One was focused on girls from Kindergarten through twelfth grade, the second on universities, and the third on our own Johnson & Johnson employees.

I led the university pillar where the funding focused on supporting universities in their efforts to increase the number of females entering and graduating in the fields of STEM, and to increase the number of female professors in STEM. We partnered with universities across the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America who were committed to diversity. Columbia of course was on the top of the list.

I retired two years ago and, looking back, I realized that I never got to build a physical bridge, as I set out to do as a young student. But instead, throughout my career I found myself needing to build all kind of metaphorical bridges between engineering and business, between employees and management, between cultures, between my vision and the realities I had to face and accept.

My focus on innovation continues after retirement, working with visionary companies that either invest in or develop novel technologies, algorithms and services to improve Healthcare.

In today’s world of rapid socioeconomic change, true leaders will be required to address issues of equity–building diverse teams, fostering inclusion and collaboration, and showing empathy. Most importantly they need to share with their teams an inspiring vision worth working hard for. Change must be embraced and adapted quickly in new and unfamiliar environments.

Peter Drucker, a management consultant, educator and author, wrote back in 1980, “the greatest danger in times of turbulence, is not turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”

We need to stay connected with the people and the institutions that continuously innovate. And for that and many more personal reasons, my engagement with our engineering school continues.

Columbia Engineering is indeed about Engineering for Humanity. Find opportunities to partner, support and strengthen the work and the diversity of the school's students, faculty, and administration.

Speaking from my experience, I can tell you that staying connected to our engineering school will be the best decision you can make for yourself and your career.

Thank you