About me
About me
Here I intend to share a little bit about myself and what is important to me.
First of all, let me introduce myself: I’m Paty Novais, currently a data and artificial intelligence manager in a big company. But, of course, I’m more than my present badge.
I was born in a humble family in the countryside of São Paulo and I’ve been working since I was eleven. As my family worked in a free market, math and logical thinking was a normal part of my childhood, which let me learn to love using my brain and my smartness to solve problems with logic and creativity. It was amazing when my father used to ask us about some logical and mathematical puzzles, kidding with our curiosity and blowing our minds.
Another really great memory from my childhood was when I used to layed down on the yard, beside my father and my siblings, to observe and admire the night sky while we ate some kind of donuts made by my mom.
That family background gave me what I needed to decide to enter in the science and math journey to be a Physicist and a Astrophysicist. It was a difficult journey, mainly in the beginning, when I faced an enormous list of issues and difficulties as a poor girl in the most important university of Brazil. But I’ve been resilient since ever and with my family and friends support I got that.
I became a physicist, entered a master program and finished my PhD in extragalactic astrophysics just on time to… to leave the academic world and enter the cooperative one, in order to become a Data Scientist.
To be quite honest, it was hard to understand the ways of life and get that I was changing my journey but that doesn’t mean that I was not a scientist anymore. On the contrary, leaving the academy I had the opportunity to use all the knowledge that I got with my scientific journey in so many areas and projects! My mind blew again when I understood that I had the opportunity to explore more of my hard and soft skills in a different way.
And I loved it so much that I started to engage myself to learn more and more about the data world, about how I could improve myself and how I could share my abilities with other people, inspiring them to become data scientists like me.
During that rediscovery time, I found out that I loved other things: to lead and to inspire other people, mainly women, because I always loved to teach and engage people. I joined many initiatives to empower women in science and technology because I realized, just as Sally Rider said, girls needed role models to be inspired to be anything they could want to be. As a woman in science and, now in the corporate world, I’m a role model to many other women and girls.
Since I begin this path into the data world many things happened to me until I got my current position as the responsible for the data strategy in a big company and I intend to use this place to share some thoughts and knowledge that I accumulated along this journey, in addition to sharing some of the pains and delights of continuing to do science and changing paradigms, since now I am not only a scientist (astrophysicist or data), but I am also a female executive and who is learning to be her best new version: an executive scientist or an scientist executive.