FEATURE STORY

VSB Alumni Making an Impact

VSB’s mission is to develop business leaders for a better world through our unique Augustinian values of truth, community, caring and leading through service. Our community includes creative problem solvers, collaborative leaders and humble servants who represent Veritas, Unitas, Caritas.

Each day, in big and small ways, our alumni live the VSB mission in their workplaces, in their communities and around the globe. Over the past year, we created a collection of personal stories on our website of VSB community members who are making an impact in their personal and professional lives.

A sampling of these stories follows below and on the next four pages. Visit business.villanova.edu to learn about more VSB community members who are making a positive impact.

Kathleen Blehl ’18 VSB

Nick Carney ’16 VSB

Gabriel Newman ’12 VSB

Helene Purcell ’11 VSB

Blehl embodies the versatility of a VSB education, taking her business acumen and passion for sustainability around the globe. Carney strives to positively impact health and the arts in Rwanda, maintaining a connection to community and services developed at Villanova. Newman shares how the support and exposure he gained at VSB were invaluable to him as a first-generation college student who now works in news media.

Purcell studies natural disasters and risk preferences while pursuing an Economics PhD.

Sharing Our Stories:

Aaron Weis

Aaron Weis ’07 EMBA has served as chief information officer for the Department of the Navy since 2019. In this role, Weis is responsible for information management and digital, data and cyber strategy within the Department of the Navy.

’07 EMBA

Weis left the corporate world to serve as senior adviser to the Department of Defense CIO in 2018. He had never served in the military, but his father had been in the Navy and it was something that always appealed to him. “It was a chance to serve my country and try to do some good,” he explains. Before joining the Defense Department, Weis had worked in the private sector as senior vice president and CIO at Axalta Coating Systems, where he led the company’s move to a cloud-based infrastructure. He was also CIO for Sensata Technologies and held other technology and senior management positions at Tyco International and Siemens Corporation.

Earlier in his career, Weis was drawn to the Villanova Executive MBA program for its systems thinking approach and holistic, macro view of the world.

“The Villanova program solidified for me an understanding of how everything is related, and things don’t exist in a vacuum,” says Weis.

He credits the EMBA for paying dividends years later. “It almost seems counterintuitive, but somehow as I get further away from the actual degree, the degree itself has become more important because it’s opened doors that I don’t think would have been available without it.” Weis has remained connected to the University over the years, serving as a member of the Graduate Business Advisory Council and a guest speaker for the Center for Business Analytics.

The biggest challenge Weis has faced in his roles with the Navy and DoD is modernizing 20-year-old technology architecture. “We are in a struggle every day with cyberattacks,” explains Weis. “It is imperative that our infrastructure and technology are where they need to be to face these threats.” The COVID-19 pandemic has supercharged efforts to modernize.

Almost overnight, Weis oversaw the process of transitioning the population of teleworking employees from 12,000 to 200,000. Within the past year, Weis has led efforts to move the Navy to a cloud-based infrastructure, deploying 400,000 suites of Office 365, shutting down servers and consolidating networks into a single enterprise network.

“It is humbling and inspiring to work with members of the military. The challenges are vast, but I’ll probably never do anything more impactful in my career and it’s an honor to serve my country in this way,” says Weis.

Weis keeps a painting of the USS Enterprise (CVN-65)–the Navy’s first nuclear aircraft carrier–in his office as a reminder of his father, who served on the ship from 1967–1972. “Dad is still my biggest fan and one of the inspirations for me coming to the Department of Navy, and the painting reminds me of that.”

Sharing Our Stories:

Jaya Kolhatkar

Jaya Kolhatkar ’86 MBA, executive vice president, Disney Direct to Consumer Data, was part of the inaugural MBA class at VSB.

Kolhatkar came to the US from India after marrying Santosh Kolhatkar ’81 COE. In a matter of months, she had graduated from college, gotten married and moved to the US, and had no work experience. “I was lucky enough to get a position as a marketing research assistant in the MBA program,” she explains. “That opportunity set up the foundational elements for my career. It was the first time I was putting what I was learning into practice.”

After completing her degree, Kolhatkar went to work for an insurance company in a predictive analytics position. “I had no idea what predictive analytics was,” she recalls. “My employer assured me that the market research analytical skills I had acquired in the MBA program could be applied to predictive analytics. And he was right.” Predictive analytics— using historical data to predict future outcomes—was an area that was just starting to be used by many different industries, with the insurance field leading the way. After a few years, she took a new job at a bank using analytics in the area of credit risk. “I was struck by how I could take what I had learned and translate it to solving problems in a different domain,” she says.

Kolhatkar’s career then took her to Amazon, PayPal and eBay, where she worked in various analytics roles as the internet economy was in its infancy. Post-eBay, she co-founded a predictive analytics firm, Inkiru, whose highly scalable platform was designed to use predictive intelligence and data to help companies with strategic decisionmaking. Inkiru was later acquired by WalmartLabs. She eventually became senior vice president, Global Data at Walmart Inc.

In 2018, Kolhatkar joined Hulu as chief data officer, where she was tasked with “making Hulu great at data.” She is responsible for elevating customer intelligence, implementing strong data governance and driving a culture of data-driven decision-making. Currently, she manages a team across strategic analytics, data engineering, data product, data science and business intelligence. Her charter has changed recently to include all Disney Streaming properties, namely Disney+, ESPN+, Star+ and Hulu.

Kolhatkar credits the Villanova MBA program with laying the foundation for her future career success.

“I cannot understate how much of an impact Villanova had on my career. If I had not gotten the research assistant position, and if my professors had not pushed me to learn things I was not very comfortable with learning at that point in time, I would not have had the career that I have had. I think of these professors often and of the groundwork they laid for my career.” \v/

’86 MBA