Project Manager
D2M
Business Development Fellow 2007/08

"The Business Development program really showed its value to me when I was interviewing for positions toward the end of the Spring term.  I was interviewing with a startup company, and thanks to the instruction in the program, I was able to ask the right questions to really assess a unique job opportunity and the associated risk.  I never would have been able to do this prior to the experience." Cristina Tcheyan

Cristina Tcheyan is a Project Manager at D2M in Mountain View.  D2M is a full service engineering consultancy based in the Silicon Valley. The company specializies in concept generation, solution identification and engineering execution.

Cristina graduated in June 2008 with her M.S. from the Department of Applied Science,, focusing on biophysics and membrane dynamics.  While completing her masters, she was drawn to the Business Development Fellows program because of its focus on training scientists and engineers to think like entrepreneurs.  In 2007, Cristina and her colleagues won the People's Choice Award for a more efficient high-throughput drug discovery screening device in the UC Davis Big Bang Business Plan Competition.

Cristina received her B.S. in Physics at New York University where she was awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship to test High Electron Mobility Transistors for the Sunyaev-Zeldovich Array at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago, in 2003. She won a second award in 2004 from the National Science Foundation to research alongside National Spherical Torus Experiment scientists at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory where she modeled the torus' magnetic rings to better understand the generation of turbulence in plasmas.  After graduating in 2004, Cristina went to work at McMaster-Carr Industrial Supply Company in New Brunswick, NJ where she worked as a marketing associate and managed sales and customer service representatives.