Alumni Spotlight Series: A Path Through Startups, Big Tech, and Everything in Between — Priyanshi Shah

Event details Date: Wednesday, October 21, 2026 Time: 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM Location: Online Type: Lecture / Workshop Audience: Staff and Faculty, Alumni, Students About this event Startup or big tech: Which one’s for you? Priyanshi Shah has experienced both. Join this Alumni Spotlight conversation as she traces her path from research to leading AI and product at a startup to her work today at Microsoft. Explore how the work changes across organizations, what you gain and give up, and why the technical-versus-business tradeoff turned out to be less of a fork in the road than she expected. Priyanshi will also discuss why personal branding matters more than ever. Bring questions about your own next move. About the presenter Priyanshi Shah earned her MS in Data Science at UC San Diego in 2024. She is a senior applied scientist at Microsoft, where she works on AI agents, large language models, and evaluation frameworks for production systems. Previously, she was head of AI and a founding engineer at a health AI startup, building multi-agent systems using wearable data and leading an engineering team of more than 15 people. Admission is free. This is a virtual event; register through 12twenty. REGISTER HERE Official event details: https://calendar.ucsd.edu/event/alumni-spotlight-series-priyanshi-shah