News

Alumni Spotlight - Vedika Chawla '13

March 21, 2020
Nicholas Sawicki
interview

Like many Brown students, class of 2013 alumna, Vedika Chawla, describes herself as an A+ type personality from a young age who was always organized and cared about doing well in school - qualities that make for a talented engineer. Vedika graduated from Brown with honors, earning a degree in Biomedical Engineering. Having recently earned her MBA from Columbia Business School and as a current Senior Project Manager of Novartis, Chawla’s educational and professional trajectory has been anything but linear.

Chawla was born and raised in India where she attended Mallya Aditi International School. Early on, Chawla knew that she enjoyed studying “sciences and maths” more so than the humanities, but still considered herself to be a “jack of all trades.” This is what ultimately attracted Chawla to the American educational system, and Brown in particular. She lamented about the fact that in India, students are required to “choose a major and stick it out” before even entering college. However, Chawla still wanted to explore and see what was out there before committing to any one particular major. As an underclassmen at an international high school, Chawla was able to observe older upperclassmen apply to colleges abroad and in the United States where they could take time to decide what they wanted to do. But since nobody else in her family had ever attended university in the United States, Chawla had to act as a trailblazer and chart her own path to and through the American university system. Having done the difficult task of paving the way, Chawla’s sister ended up attending Brown after her.

Around 10th or 11th grade, Chawla remembers coming to the United States to visit many different universities and see if receiving an education in the US was something she wanted to pursue. Without family members who had “done it before” combined with the fact that her family lived so far away, it was imperative for Chawla to really feel comfortable with the decision she was making. She distinctly remembers visiting and applying to a number of colleges, but that while attending an info session at Brown she felt that “everyone was just so nice.” To her, Brown represented the antithesis of the Indian education system; she saw it as an institution where you could literally “do whatever you wanted and figure it out as you went along.” That combined with the beautiful campus and comfortable “feel of the place” is what really made Chawla decide to come to Brown.

While she felt like the high credit requirement of the engineering curriculum undoubtedly limited her ability to make full use of the Open Curriculum, Chawla still expressed that Brown engineering allowed students to explore their passions outside of engineering much more so than at any other engineering school. Each semester, Chawla recalls taking a fourth class outside of the engineering core which she really enjoyed doing, whether that be an English first-year-seminar or a class on social entrepreneurship. She believes that this allowed her to be a more multidisciplinary thinker and look at problems more holistically rather than from a purely scientific perspective.

When the time came to choose a concentration, Chawla believes that Biomedical Engineering really blended her dual passions of medicine and solving healthcare problems through an engineering lens. As an undergrad, she worked in Dr. Tripathi’s microfluidics lab which investigates clinical applications involving diagnosis of cancer and infectious diseases as well as protein structure, and basic questions regarding biological molecules. While the research itself was immensely interesting to Chawla, she saw it more as a way to gain exposure and see if pursuing a graduate degree in BME was something that she wanted to do. After working in the lab for a year and a half where she wrote her senior thesis, Chawla realized that the concept of “working in isolation” in a lab did not appeal to her. It did, however, allow her to discover that she really wanted to work in industry or in a business setting where she could interact with a lot of people while still focusing on life science and healthcare problems.

Outside of the research lab, Chawla believes that her academic experience at Brown was enhanced by the wonderful faculty members who mentored her during her time here. This may come as a shock to many current students at Brown, but the beloved Dean Rashid Zia used to teach the course Electricity and Magnetism, which Chawla distinctly remembers as one of her “favorite” courses while at Brown because of the man himself who taught it (no real surprise there). Other impressionable faculty members include Professor Hoffman-Kim who taught (and still teaches) Tissue Engineering, as well as her Social Entrepreneurship class with the esteemed Professor Barrett Hazeltine (whom the common area in the ERC is named after).

When asked about her favorite class at Brown, Chawla was initially conflicted, and, like a true Brunonian, asked if it had to be one within her concentration. If so, she believes that Tissue Engineering was her favorite engineering class, but that she probably enjoyed her Social Entrepreneurship course the most. In each class, she would do a case study about a social enterprise in a different part of the world. And afterwards the founder or somebody from the organization being studied would come and speak to everyone. This really appealed to Chawla’s business proclivity, and planted the seed that would later result in her applying to business school.

After graduating from Brown, Chawla worked at Deloitte for a few years where she enjoyed her time, but felt as though she were being siloed in the electronic medical records implementation field that she was working in. While her skills were developing in that one particular area, opportunities outside of it were not readily available to Chawla. Business school would open more doors for her and present additional opportunities to do something different if she wanted to, which is what lead to her graduating from Columbia with an MBA in healthcare management/administration (without even taking Principles of Economics while at Brown). Chawla’s time at Columbia made her realize that she wanted to remain in the healthcare field which is how she ended up working at Novartis upon graduating. She saw the marketing roles at Novartis as a way for her to “come back to science” but in a business capacity where she could still work with “cool,” lifesaving oncology products but in an industrial rather than a lab setting. She interned at Novartis between her first and second years of business school and absolutely loved the experience. It was the perfect blend of interaction with doctors and understanding the disease state while working on cool marketing materials and the entire business aspect of science. This lead to a full-time employment offer from Novartis, where Chawla is currently in the commercial leadership and development rotational program. There, Chawla’s roles vary from working on marketing materials that Novartis uses to convey the efficacy of their products to physicians, to budget and tactical planning where she was essentially given the entire budget and asked to figure out where the company should be spending most of their time and resources.

In the long term, Chawla doesn’t really know what the future holds. She can see herself remaining in the healthcare sector, but whether that entails working at a medical device company or a small health startup, Chawla cannot say. Whatever, she ultimately decides to do, however, Chawla is confident that her time at Brown gave her the flexibility to have options and pursue what she’s truly passionate about.