VCU Business alumni among VCU’s 2024 10 Under 10 honorees
VCU Alumni’s 10 Under 10 awards program recognizes the noteworthy and distinctive achievements of alumni who earned their first VCU degree (undergraduate, graduate or professional) within the past 10 years.
The 2024 honorees — the 10th group of alumni to receive this special honor — will be recognized Oct. 19 at a private ceremony.
2024 VCU School of Business 10 Under 10 honorees:
Bryan Portillo
Vice President, Integrated IPO Solutions, Morgan Stanley
B.S. International Business Administration, 2014
When Bryan Portillo (B.S. ’14) sat on a VCU finance career panel last year, he told students how he landed an officer position on Wall Street: through networking and determination.
“I’ve had to be scrappy,” Portillo says. “I’ve had to fight harder to get to the same place [as more well-connected students], but at the end of the day, the work pays off because I’m in the same room as everybody else.”
While studying international management at VCU, Portillo networked his way into internships lobbying on Capitol Hill, supporting the office of U.S. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, and working in state government relations with the Richmond law firm McGuireWoods. When he graduated, the firm hired him to work on its intellectual property litigation team.
Portillo contemplated a legal career but, after deciding against it, left to work as a consultant with a Washington, D.C.-based intellectual property management and technology company. He was recruited by Morgan Stanley to work in global regulatory relations in 2018.
As a new Morgan Stanley employee, “I networked until my face turned blue,” Portillo says. He connected with a colleague in the firm’s Latin American investment banking management division while mentoring international high school students through the volunteer organization Glasswing International. He was subsequently hired to work on that team.
A year later, Portillo joined the firm’s integrated initial public offering team, where he helps companies issue IPO shares to employees, consumers and other constituents. Earlier this year, he was named a vice president in the division.
Portillo credits his parents, who immigrated from El Salvador, for instilling a strong work ethic.
“My dad was a doctor and a pharmacist in El Salvador, and when he left during the civil war there and came to the United States, nobody would accept his medical degree. The only job he could do was clean the floors at a Sears superstore,” Portillo says. “He told me, ‘If you want to make it in this world, you have to make your own luck.'”
Aaron R. Williams
Lead Data Science for Statistical Computing, Urban Institute
B.S. Economics, 2014
B.A. Music, 2014
Aaron R. Williams (B.A. ’14, B.S. ’14) spends a lot of time thinking about data privacy. As a lead scientist for the Urban Institute, a nonprofit that uses research to advance equity and strengthen communities, Williams knows policymakers need good data to make effective decisions. He also knows he needs to protect people’s information from being compromised.
The solution? Create fake data.
“We’re training machine-learning models to generate entirely fake data that have the same statistical properties as confidential data [from real people],” Williams says. “They’re still useful for research but have far less disclosure risk.”
Williams leads workshops around the country to share what he’s learned about data analysis techniques and tools, including how to develop models that estimate the effects of policy changes and how to use R, a programming language that helps analysts manipulate, calculate and display data. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
When Williams arrived at VCU in 2010, he didn’t plan to become a data scientist; he wanted to be a professional musician. The next year, he joined the Honors College and began taking classes in economics and math. He took enough courses to graduate with degrees in both music and economics.
Williams had an “aha” moment a year later on the way to a gig. “I was touring with this band, reading my econ textbook in the back seat,” says Williams. “And at a certain point, it kind of dawned on me that I actually really like this economics, research-type thing.”
Though his music degree might seem irrelevant to his current work, he finds surprising connections. The improvisational skills he learned in jazz classes help him be a better teacher, and the class he took on arranging music relates to his work managing data.
“The class was taught by a very accomplished professor named Doug Richards who wrote big-band charts for 20 musicians,” says Williams. “That was really good for learning how to structure something that’s so large and how to think through problems that are that big. I think about that all the time, because large-scale computer programming is shockingly similar.”
For the full list of honorees, visit vcualumni.org/events/10-under-10.
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