About Us

The slopes of Aspen seem an unlikely place to forge a meaningful bond, but yet, that is where Dr. Ghazaleh Sadri-Vakili of Harvard Medical School and I met. We were at a neuroscience meeting and quickly discovered that we had a number of things in common.  Aside from doing similar research, we are both the kind of woman that can unreservedly celebrate another person's success and we both work hard to break stereotypes associated with young, successful women.  In talking, we realized that there is a huge group of women out there that fit this description and would benefit from each other's experience, advice and connections.  And that is how, over sushi at 10,000 feet, the Professional Women's Nexus (PWN) was born. 


PWN’s mission statement is to provide a network for the up and coming generation of female scientists, businesswomen and other professionals to share their knowledge and experience, from technical expertise to negotiating advice, in a supportive environment.  Importantly, we are careful to preserve a spirit of celebrating each other’s achievements, realizing that far more is accomplished by the synergism of putting our intelligence and networking skills to use helping one another.  


Our network has quickly grown since its inception in April 2007.  PWN now boasts over 200 members across the US, Europe and the Middle East.  Our members include scientists, from astrophysicists to neuroscientists, professors, writers, artists, and marketing directors.  We have helped each other obtain prestigious positions we might not have heard of otherwise (and negotiate impressive salaries to boot), figured out the most constructive way to communicate with difficult colleagues and superiors, reviewed each other’s grants and business plans, told our younger counterparts how to avoid most (but manage the inevitable) situations of harassment, advocated for each other when we heard of a fitting opportunity, and, perhaps most importantly, celebrate each other’s successes.