Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

Shilpa Reddy

Shilpa Reddy, who graduated from Georgetown in 2004 with a degree in Mathematics, gives glowing reviews of her undergraduate experience. “I really loved the math department at Georgetown,” Reddy says. “It was small and so accessible, and my professors always made time to go over difficult theorems with me, or to just talk about what was going on in my life at Georgetown. The professors also put of a lot of effort into teaching the material thoroughly, rather than just throwing a bunch of math books and homework at us (which, according to various friends, is not uncommon at other universities).”

Reddy did her thesis on the Pohlig-Hellman cryptographic algorithm, with Dr. Hans Engler serving as her advisor. Dr. Engler, she says, “spent countless hours with me, wading through my sometimes dense thesis material. He gave me just the right amount of guidance, so that I was never lost in an unfamiliar world of math ideas, but still had enough independence to come to my own conclusions and ideas about the mathematical concepts I was studying. I couldn’t have asked for a better thesis advisor.”

In addition to a long-standing involvement with math and science research, Reddy worked as a coordinator for the DC Schools Project and the ESL program while at Georgetown. She envisioned a career that combined working in a nonprofit with science in some capacity. Since leaving Georgetown, Reddy has been quite busy on the path to her goal. Right after graduation, she spent some time working with a political campaign in DC, after which she spent a year working as a researcher in an HIV vaccine lab at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, her hometown. With ambition to work in the field of medicine, Reddy completed her pre-med requirements in 2005 and worked with patients in an HIV clinic.

In early 2006, she moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to take an internship with the Southern Center for Human Rights, a prisoner rights law firm, where researched HIV- and hepatitis-related prisoner cases. Later that year, she worked as a research intern with the Southern Center for International Studies, an international relations public education organization also in based in Atlanta. Reddy recently returned from a six-week trip to India studying yoga and is about to begin a new job coordinating science programs for the Girl Scouts of Northwest Georgia. She is particularly looking forward to this new job.

As for ultimate plans, says Reddy, “I would like to stay involved in the health field, either as a physician or public health professional (or both!).”

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