Trac Bannon: It’s so crazy how I meet many of the Real Technologists. Sometimes it’s through professional meetings, other times it’s through LinkedIn. No doubt you’ve heard of a game called ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.’ It demonstrates the concept of six degrees of separation, which suggests that any two people on earth are six or fewer social connections apart. Well, in the world of Real Technologists, it’s more like ‘Two Degrees of Jennifer Ives.’ Jennifer, a previous guest and a powerhouse connector, introduced me to the brilliant Dr. Meghan Anzelc. Jennifer’s network is a goldmine of tech brilliance; Meghan is no exception. Dr. Meghan Anzelc was introduced to Jennifer Ives through a session on AI conducted by CHIEF. CHIEF is a private network designed to connect and support women in executive leadership positions. Jennifer attended the session and found herself resonating with much of what Meghan was saying, and they connected from there.

Meghan Anzelc is one of those remarkable individuals whose journey started in a close-knit family in Chicago. Growing up with a sister just 18 months younger, Meghan was part of an extended family that was not only supportive but deeply engaged in her upbringing. That sense of close-knit extended Irish American family is something that has left such a wonderful mark on Dr. Anzelc. Even before I found out that she’s a firstborn, I could see the telltale signs: she is conscientious, reliable, responsible, and maybe a little bit of a perfectionist. The Anzelc household was unique; Meghan was homeschooled for most of her grammar and high school years. This was quite unusual at the time, but it opened doors for her to dive into myriad extracurricular activities.

Meghan Anzelc: We were a homeschooling family, we were involved in lots of things, and this was at a time before very many people homeschooled. So we had a community of other homeschooling families in the Chicago area that we did stuff with, but a lot of extracurriculars. So I started dancing when I was three, so I’ve been getting up on stages since I was three years old. I danced all through college, including competitive Irish dancing. So I hold a world medal in Irish dancing. I played music. So I played piano for about 20 years.

Trac Bannon: Alongside dancing, Meghan played piano, and her involvement in fine arts paints a picture of a childhood rich in creativity and expression. Meghan is the definition of STEAM. I’m a strong proponent and supporter of STEAM. What’s STEAM? STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Design. Arts and Mathematics. It’s an educational approach that integrates these five disciplines to foster a more holistic and interdisciplinary learning experience. The inclusion of the arts in STEAM, compared to traditional STEM, emphasizes creativity, creative thinking, and innovation alongside the technical skills. I’m the daughter of a public school superintendent and an art teacher, though I hold homeschooling in very high regard. I see it as a golden opportunity to provide a tailored, enriching educational experience. The flexibility it offers is unmatched, allowing for the exploration of diverse interests and activities that traditional schooling can’t always accommodate. It was through the Girl Scouts that Meghan became a published poet.

Meghan Anzelc: I was a Girl Scout all through grammar school in high school and actually am a published poet because of the Girl Scouts. So I have a poem published in one of their Girl Scout handbooks that was published nationally.

Trac Bannon: She is not just intimidatingly bright. She’s a renaissance woman. She really is. The path to a PhD in physics is typical Meghan. She started out not knowing what she wanted to major in… she was undecided, though signed up for music and fine arts classes. And like so many Real Technologists, Meghan decided to say yes to a challenge, to an opportunity that changed her life forever.

Meghan Anzelc: My story is different than most people that pursue a bachelor’s in physics. So, I was undeclared my first year of college, I had no idea what I wanted to do, and I picked a liberal arts university in part because of that. And I had always been interested in science, but also very deep into the arts and fine arts. So I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had not taken physics in high school, and so I talked to a chemistry professor who was a friend of the family, who taught at my alma mater, and I said, um, I think I should take physics at some point in my life. And he said, well, if you really want to learn physics, you should take calculus-based physics. And I said, okay, all right, so I’ll go sign up for calculus-based physics. Over the summer, the dean’s office called me and they said, that physics course is only available to physics majors. And I said, what does that mean? They said, well, it means you have to come into the dean’s office and sign a sheet of paper. I said, what if I changed my mind? They said you come back to the dean’s office and you sign another sheet of paper.

Trac Bannon: Suddenly, she was surrounded by students who had taken AP Physics in high school. This was Dr. Anzelc’s first exposure to physics and in her words, It was brutal; she was drowning the entire time. By the second semester, they included electricity and magnetism and that threw everyone.

Meghan Anzelc: And so suddenly, everyone was drowning, and I was like, welcome to my world, we can all sort of figure this out together. And then from there, I decided I at least wanted to minor in physics, and then the second year for the minor is really what got me to fall in love with the subject and decide to clear to, uh, actually, I had already declared the major, but to actually pursue the major and get a degree in it.

Trac Bannon: Meghan Anzelc is a researcher at her core. She had an internship between her first and second year at Loyola in atmospheric chemistry. It was through a woman’s science internship program at Loyola. What Meghan found out that summer was that she loved the idea of collecting data about a question she had and then starting to answer that question through a process of querying the data and understanding what was going on. She continued with influential internships in high-energy particle physics at Argonne, building parts of a detector that went to the Brookhaven Labs in New York.

Meghan Anzelc: Again, this whole idea that you could construct the machinery to do the investigation, to collect the data, to analyze, to answer these questions. So it was really research internships, that I really enjoyed, and I was interested in pursuing a career as a research scientist. Really the best way to pursue a bigger, meatier research project is to pursue a PhD.

Trac Bannon: Being the child of educators, I have a love of learning. For Meghan, the experience of being homeschooled coupled with her own curiosity drove and continues to drive her choices. That said, I’m not quite sure where she gets her energy. Her college years were a whirlwind of passion, creativity, and relentless energy. She thrived on a perfect blend of left-brain precision and right-brain artistry. She continued dancing, including competitive Irish dancing, clinching a world medal. Let me repeat that… while studying physics at Loyola, she clinched a world medal in Irish dancing. She was still playing piano as well as working at a barista at a coffee shop. And it didn’t stop there: student groups, staff writing, teaching physics labs to more junior students, prepping others for GREs and MCATs. All the while, she was a bit of a unicorn. She was and is a woman in a male-dominated field.

Meghan Anzelc: I think my family at times kind of struggled with some of it in the sense of physics is incredibly male dominated. And so, right, most of my classmates were men. Um, there’s only about 10 percent of PhDs in physics awarded every year that go to women. When I was in graduate school, it was very easy to find my girlfriends. You just go to the back of the room and look for the one ponytail that’s in the room, and that’s your friend, because there is nobody else, right? So it is incredibly male dominated. Physics is not an easy subject and it didn’t come easily to me. I worked really, really hard at it.

Trac Bannon: What drives someone like Dr. Meghan Anzelc? It’s impact. She continually strives to broaden and deepen her impact. She is both introverted and extroverted, and there’s a term for that, an ambivert. Ambiverts can adapt their behavior depending on the situation, sometimes enjoying social interactions and other times preferring solitude. One of her favorite stories to tell is that someone once told her, “you’re really extroverted for a physicist.” Her response? “Well, that doesn’t really help because most physicists are pretty introverted.”

Meghan graduated from Loyola with a BS in physics and minors in music and math. From there, she headed to Northwestern for a master’s and PhD in Physics and Astronomy. Her journey was not alone, though. In college, she met her husband to be. Both Chicago natives, both passionate about staying connected to friends and family, they met at a housewarming party. It wasn’t the normal sort of introduction through friends. It was actually the result of Irish dancing and a 7-foot ceiling.

Meghan Anzelc: My husband and I met through mutual friends, they were having a housewarming party at a house they had just purchased in Chicago. So I knew the wife, he knew the husband, it was an Irish family. So the expectation was it was going to be right an Irish house party. And my sister and I were expected to dance and to bring our instruments and play. And we were in their basement, which like all Chicago basements, you know, has a ceiling that’s about seven feet. I was dancing, maybe 10 seconds in, I did a jump and hit my head into the main support beam of the basement. I kept going because it’s not the first time I had hit my head on a basement in Chicago. I hit that beam so hard that I knocked the filament out of the bulb of the light. So the light goes out. I hit my head. Everybody gasps. I just keep going. And the story is that my husband turned to his friend at the party and said, “That girl can take a two by four to the head. I want to meet her.”

Trac Bannon: Realizing that the research that she loved, especially with the national labs, was tied to federal budgetary decisions and the ebbs and flows of politics and elections, she attacked finding her first job with a research mentality. It was 2008 and the U.S. was grappling with its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Her approach was methodical and well organized. She utilized her academic network, professional societies, and personal connections to identify potential opportunities. Meghan began by tapping into the alumni networks at both Northwestern and Loyola University, where she found responsive contacts who could offer guidance. She also leveraged her involvement with the American Physics Society, utilizing their membership directory to locate physicists working outside academia. One of these interviews led her to Travelers. A non-technical friend suggested a contact saying, “I think he’s an actuary… he does something kind of mathy.” That contact was a data scientist and by the end of the chat, they suggested she apply.

Meghan Anzelc: I was surprised at how similar the day-to-day work was to what I had been doing as a graduate student. You’re taking complex, disparate data sources, you’re writing code to pull them together, to run an analysis, to iterate, to talk to your teammates. This was just, different data, right? A totally different domain, different programming tools, different statistical methods, right? But the kind of core skills were very, very similar in terms of how people reacted. So I think lots of people were like, wait, you work at an insurance company. It’s just not an industry that talks about itself very much outside of its own world. So I don’t know that my family really kind of understood or had a good sense, but I also don’t know that many people really understood what I was doing in graduate school either.

Trac Bannon: And so it began. Like many in technical careers, Dr. Anzelc dives in, learns, conquers, then moves on every 2 to 4 years. While still at Travelers, she co-founded the first diversity business network at Travelers, creating a women’s group for the actuarial and analytics community alongside a coworker. It came at a time when the organization was ready for such a group. That group still exists in an evolved form today.

Meghan Anzelc: If the first theme through kind of my career and life is about impact, the second is really about learning. And so continually wanting to learn new things, throw myself in the deep end, be surrounded by people who know more about the topic than I do is kind of a continual theme. So with travelers, doing data science in personal insurance. I really enjoyed my experience at Travelers.

Trac Bannon: At Travelers, she went looking for more internal opportunities and, as often happens, she stumbled upon an external opportunity first. Her next stop was CNA Insurance. CNA was a pivotal shift in her career, from being a pure individual contributor to embracing management and leadership. She had already begun leading people and projects at Travelers, but CNA offered a bigger stage, not to mention the opportunity to have her coworkers in the same building. Meghan found fulfillment in leadership. Enjoying her new role, she easily let go of individual tasks, focusing on strategic goals and mentoring her team effectively.

Meghan Anzelc: So I had started leading people and projects at Travelers, so I had already started moving from, a pure individual contributor role into a management and leadership role in a smaller scope way. And the opportunity at CNA let me expand that. So, you know, moving more into pure management and leadership. And that was a transition that I wanted and was interested in. So I’ve told lots of students, right, if, Yes, there’s, you can make more money moving up in a company, but you also want to make sure that you actually want the job, that you actually want to manage and lead, because please, God, we don’t need more bad bosses in the world, right?

Trac Bannon: Her career as a data scientist and AI expert is a beautiful kaleidoscope when we look at all of the places where Dr. Anzelc has spent her time. Were any of these events pushed by circumstance as opposed to being pulled by a dream? Her journey is a mismatch of being both pushed and pulled. From CNA, she followed her dream to Zurich Insurance Group before an enormous financial loss would see her lose her job in a headcount reduction. You see, in 2015, catastrophic explosions at the Tianjin port in China resulted in approximately $275 million in property and marine losses for Zurich. Her next stop was as Chief Analytics Officer for AXIS Capital, an insurance carrier with nearly $24 billion in assets. This was a puddle hop before joining Spencer Stewart as the global head of data and analytics. Remember that college student spinning dozens of plates? That has continued throughout her career. She has held multiple influential advisory roles that leverage her extensive expertise in data and analytics. That’s probably why she founded Three Arc Advisory in 2022. She is president and Chief Data and Analytics Officer. Unlike some folks who turn to leadership and lose their technical roots, Meghan still knows data, she knows analytics, she knows math, and she knows how to ask the important questions. She may not be writing code each day, though she is directly guiding industry with the delivery of the AI governance playbook for Leaders with the Aethena alliance.

Meghan Anzelc: So my in-laws live with us. So I say, I feel like I have kids, but they’re really hard to discipline because they’re not my parents. And right. It’s really hard to tell my seventy-year-old father-in-law what to do. And, but we have a great time together. We, we really enjoy being close to them and, and having them here. We don’t have pets. We have, uh, we live in a pretty rural area now. And so I’m surrounded by lots of nature. So we get to see, you know, the deer and the wild turkey and the foxes in the forest.

Trac Bannon: She has stayed near Chicago, though now is in the rural suburbs. Both she and her husband are natives and they have large extended families. I found it so touching to hear somebody say how important it is to be around family. The American cultural emphasis on individualism often encourages young adults to leave home to pursue personal and professional success. This cultural norm, rooted in the belief that individuals need to be self-reliant and responsible for their own achievements, has led many to prioritize career and personal aspirations over staying close to family. Think about the common expectation for children to move out and become financially independent as soon as high school or college graduation happens. I’m blessed that both of my children left for a spell, then returned, establishing their families close by. Talk about impact. Having all sorts of extended family close by will always have its quirks and nutty holidays. It can also give a sense of grounding so folks can truly spread their wings and fly. Dr. Meghan Anzelc is a very confident woman. She’s a scientist. She is well known and ever-growing in the field of data science. Dr. Anzelc stands at the forefront of helping people understand the broader picture around AI and ML. She has strong recommendations for those that she mentors. And, thinking back, if she could counsel the younger Meghan years ago, she would say…

Meghan Anzelc: Your first job out of college is just your first job. It doesn’t define who you are or what your career will be. And if you don’t like it, you can change, right? There’s a huge, vast world of things and you can’t possibly know what they all are when you’re 22 and entering the workforce. I think I learned not too far into my career, how bad I was at predicting my own life. So despite the fact that most of my career has been about predicting the future, right, about using math to predict what’s coming next. I’m really terrible at doing that for myself. And I think the thing that I’ve learned through it, though, is that you can see the common threads, some of them now, right, kind of looking back, but at the time, it wasn’t clear to me, and I think some of it for me, having that confidence in just being able to pursue what seemed fulfilling and aligned to my values and what I was interested in exploring, and not worrying so much about what the story was that I was building.

Trac Bannon: What’s next for Dr. Anzelc, the researcher, data scientist, Irish dancer, poet, and musician?

Meghan Anzelc: So I did buy a piano a couple of years ago in the pandemic, cause it seemed like a good time, right? Of sort of when we were all staying home, I said, well, I have actually enough time to practice every day if I wanted to. So that’s been really fulfilling is to come back to that after a very long time away and start relearning and re-acclimating myself. And it’s really just for me, right? I wake up every morning. I play for a while. It’s again, very different than what I do in my day job all day, which is something I enjoy too. So the music part is definitely part of it. I don’t know what the future holds, right? Like I said, I’m really terrible at predicting my own future. I know that it will continue to be multifaceted, right? I think that’s a very common thread throughout my career so far. So it will never be just the day job, it will always be that plus, you know, two or three or four other things as well.

Trac Bannon: And that’s a wrap. This podcast is a Source Network production and updates are available on your favorite audio streaming platform. Just search for Real Technologists and consider subscribing. Special thanks to our editor and sound engineer, Pokie Huang. He’s done an amazing job bringing these stories to life. The music for today’s episode was provided by Blue Dot Sessions, and we used Descript for spoken text editing, as well as Audacity for the soundscaping. The show distribution platform is provided by Captivate FM, making it easy for our listeners to find and enjoy the show. That’s all for today, folks. This is Trac Bannon. Don’t forget to subscribe and never miss an intriguing episode of Real Technologists and something new to noodle on.