Ask An Alum (AAA)

McCabe LibLab full of students with two alumni speaking about their venture in health tech

Ask an Alum 2025

As a Swarthmore student, you've studied, researched and debated a vast range of topics. Now that you know something... what do you actually do?

Whatever you are trying to figure out, odds are there's a Swattie who has accomplished extraordinary feats in your desired domain. So a few times a semester, the CIL invites alumni for an in-person Q&A to shed light on their area of expertise. Food provided!

Ask an Alum...

...about medical technology with Sean Wright '96.
  • Wednesday, October 7, 2026
  • 5:30pm-7:00pm
  • McCabe LibLab
  • Register here: https://luma.com/dswcgipf
  • ​Sean Wright '96 is a Harvard-trained, board-certified plastic surgeon and entrepreneur. He founded Swellbox, a portable digital health record platform.
...ABOUT the fashion industry with Saima Chowdhury '99.
  • Wednesday, November 11, 2026
  • 5:30pm-7:00pm
  • McCabe LibLab
  • Register here: https://luma.com/v44gt1z0

  • Saima Chowdhury '99 is the CEO/Founder Noi Solutions/Grey State Apparel. With a BA in Economics and Political Science from Swarthmore and a MBA from UPenn, come chat about how Saima went from Ernst Young, to Nike, to Victoria Secret, and now an entrepreneur.

...ABOUT AI AND NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING WITH SARAH LUGER '97
  • Thursday, November 19, 2026
  • Time: TBD
  • McCabe LibLab
  • Register Here: https://luma.com/kg7mh3nj

  • Dr. Sarah Luger is an expert in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing with over two decades of experience, specializing in human communication challenges. She recently led the Generative AI Research group at the AI data company iMerit and currently serves as co-chair of the MLCommons Datasets Working Group. Her work spans low-resource machine translation, online toxicity detection, LLM benchmarking and evaluation, increasing data annotator diversity, and responsible AI practices. Sarah holds a PhD in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh, where she focused on automated question answering. She contributed to NLP tasks at IBM Watson, including for the Jeopardy! Challenge, and has held leadership roles across the AI and human computation research communities. Her service includes organizing tutorials such as "Generative AI Evaluation Essentials" at IEEE AITest 2025, leading workshops on evaluating AI systems, AI Safety, and under-resourced language technology at COLM, AAAI, Deep Learning Indaba, and HCOMP.

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