Instructor Spotlight: Dahiana Duarte Pena
What inspired you to teach this course?
As I honed my knowledge at State Street, it dawned on me that I was burning a lot of calories to understand and master how things were done today, and though I was succeeding, it would be smarter to try to create the future. I discovered the company had an Emerging Technologies Center (ETC) and offered my skills; sure, I wasn’t a technologist, but I was smart, scrappy, a good problem solver, and passionate. I worked with them for a few months and after a stint at a startup, followed the woman who launched the ETC to Eastern Bank as her first hire on its Labs Innovation team. It’s now been 8 years since I started working in FinTech and I love the pace, the impact, and the potential it has to make financial health, literacy, and inclusion possible for most if not all people when used for good.
You’re having a new guest speaker join your class almost every week. Could you tell us about who you’ve invited and what you hope they’ll bring to your class?
There’s this idea that folks who work in technology or in finance are all one thing or one type of person. I wanted to dispel that notion. There’s also this idea that you have to be a technologist or numbers guru to work in finance, but the truth is a lot different. My class will feature speakers that span marketing, innovation, design, product, and AI roles. I want them to share their journeys, career advice, and guidance with students, along with examples of how innovation gets done in the workplace to help real people every day, so that students with the drive to do good things in financial services or technology go into the world or workforce with an edge. Tufts students have great hearts, and we need more of them everywhere.
What is one interesting piece of tech to come out of the financial sector in the past year?
AI tools like Copilot and ChatGPT are radically changing the tech tools we all use. The better these get, we’ll spend less time on transactional work and more time financially guiding customers or deepening relationships—the things that make humans individually special.
What is it like coming to teach at Tufts as an alumnus?
It’s like coming home :) I believe in paying it forward, and there is no better way to do that than sharing the skills I’ve used to succeed with students at the same institution that helped mold me into the problem-solver, innovator, and active citizen that I am today.