Your Advisers: Graduate Students & Postdocs

Dr. Joseph Barber is a Senior Associate Director at Career Services serving graduate students and postdocs.  He has a Ph.D. in animal behaviour from University of Oxford (UK), has previously worked as a Research Fellow at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and currently also teaches graduate students as an Adjunct Professor at Hunter College (CUNY).  Joseph enjoys thinking creatively to help people find and explore different career paths, and is always interested in hearing students and postdocs talk enthusiastically about their research.

Dr. Helen Pho enjoys working with graduate students and postdocs as Associate Director at Penn Career Services. Prior to joining Penn in 2017, Helen worked as a search consultant recruiting for higher education executive searches. Prior to that, she served as Director of the Freshman Scholars at Yale program and Assistant Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Yale University. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in History from Yale. Helen is delighted to be back in higher education and to support graduate students and postdocs in exploring and pursuing meaningful career paths.

Marianne joined the Career Services team in fall 2015 providing career and internship guidance to undergraduate students in the College of Arts and Sciences.  She now advises graduate students and postdocs.  She has worked at Penn since 2004, starting at the Wharton School where she was an academic advisor to undergraduate students and more recently, in their alumni relations office.  Marianne is delighted to be back in the advising realm.  She graduated from Bowdoin College with a double major in Romance Languages and History, and earned her master’s degree in Higher Education Management from the Graduate School of Education at Penn.

Kate Lawrence is the Administrative Coordinator for the advising teams that serve graduate students, post-docs, and students from the schools of nursing, education, and social policy and practice. Kate received her MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA from the University of Washington, where she studied abroad in Rome, Italy and Prague, Czech Republic. She is a Pollock/Krasner joint fellowship recipient with the Vermont Studio Center and has exhibited her artwork nationally, including at the Visual Arts Center in Austin, TX and the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, PA. Kate is always looking to engage in fresh conversations and to create spaces for communities to explore new ideas.