Goler (BS '07) Featured on CEAA Panel
APAM Alumna, Sarah Goler (B.S. '07, Applied Physics) was one of five featured panelists at the Columbia Engineering Alumni Association (CEAA) dinner on April 17, 2019 on "How to get hired from a multi-disciplinary, multifunctional perspective." Alumni discussed their current industry, career trajectory, and offer career tips to current students.
Name: Sarah Goler
Hails from: New York City, NY
Undergraduate degree: Applied Physics, SEAS, 2007
Postgraduate degree: Condensed Matter Physics, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy, 2014. I studied graphene for hydrogen storage. Graphene is a single layer of graphite and is very flexible and strong. I used a scanning tunneling microscope in ultra high vacuum to study the fundamental interaction between graphene (a hexagonal carbon lattice in 2D) and atomic hydrogen as a function of curvature and temperature. The ultimate goal is to create safe, high density, controllable, and reusable hydrogen storage devices.
Firms worked: I worked at Columbia (from around 2013 to 2017) in various capacities during this time - technician for the clean room, postdoc, academic scholar.
Current firm/location: Tannat Wine & Cheese LLC, Manhattan, NYC. I own a tiny restaurant and natural wine bar with my husband William Emery Justice. Our restaurant works exclusively with local farms in the Hudson Valley. Owning a business means I do all the jobs, select wine, manage the team, work in the kitchen, work the bar, pay our team, deal with all the bureaucracy, accounting, etc.
Other interests: Ultramarathoning (very out of shape these days), pottery (I make all the plates, mugs, bowls, etc for our restaurant)
Brief Family notes: I grew up in NYC with my Mom and sister. My mom is a molecular parasitologist who had an academic career doing research at NYU on malaria and then a second career at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in regulatory. My sister owns an organic horse powered farm in the Hudson Valley called Full Circus Farm. Lots of our produce and meat comes from her farm.
Can speak to: Working as an experimental physicist and getting my Ph.D. taught me how to solve problems. I love solving problems and this is a skill that is applicable in many different fields. I have taken those skills and a love for knowledge and applied them to owning a business and studying wine both from a chemistry background and from tasting. Learning about wine has been analogous to delving deep into an area of physics. I am training my sense of smell and taste to identify grapes, years, regions, alcohol percentage, etc.