Erica Ram ’16, MS, found at Adelphi the close faculty relationships and hands-on opportunities that would launch their career in technology.
Faculty members Professor Robert Siegfried, PhD; Professor Lee Stemkoski, PhD; Assistant Teaching Professor Kristin Pepper; and Kees Leune, PhD, associate professor and chair of mathematics and computer science, helped Erica build both technical confidence and a collaborative approach to learning.
Erica graduated with departmental honors as a computer science major. While working on their degree, they held student worker positions at Swirbul Library, the Office of Information Technology and in the Mathematics and Computer Science department. They also interned with the Village of Garden City.
Soon after graduation, Erica was selected for the Microsoft Research Data Science Summer School, a program serving students from diverse, nontraditional and underrepresented backgrounds in STEM. Their team studied customer loyalty using public data and presented its findings at Microsoft Research New York and national diversity-in-computing conferences. Erica then returned to Adelphi to support the University’s analytics and data-visualization work before earning an MS in computer science from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Erica joined The Walt Disney Company first through internships in data science, management science and data engineering and has been with the company full time since early 2020. As a senior data engineer, they partner across product and decision-science teams to define data needs, build pipelines and support the infrastructure that informs decisions throughout the company.
Erica also creates opportunities for others in technology. They were a technologist representative of Disney at the Grace Hopper Celebration in 2019 and, since 2024, have helped lead the Disney Data & Analytics Women Award experience, which brings four women in analytics to the company’s annual conference to present research and build professional relationships.
Adelphi recognizes Erica for technical leadership, career achievement, and sustained work to widen access and belonging in computing and analytics.
Member of Adelphi University’s 10 Under 10