Mathangi Srinivasan
University of California, San Diego — Rady School of Management
Age: 36
“Engineer, leader, integrator — building bridges between science, business, and people.”
Hometown: Singapore
Family Members: My parents are my greatest inspiration and the quiet motivation behind everything I pursue. Watching them navigate life’s challenges with grace has shaped who I am as a leader and as a person.
My brothers, Ganesh Srinivasan and Arvind Asokan, are my two greatest pillars of support. This past year in particular — balancing a demanding career, an EMBA, and significant family responsibilities — would not have been possible without them. They showed up in every way that mattered, and I don’t take that for granted for a single day.
Fun fact about yourself: I’m a certified scuba diving master and ocean conservationist — and I’ve found that the patience and calm required underwater translates surprisingly well to navigating complex engineering challenges and leadership situations above it.
Undergraduate School and Degree:
Bachelor’s Degree in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore
Where are you currently working? Illumina, Inc. — Associate Director of Engineering, Technical Operations (San Diego, CA)
Extracurricular Activities, Community Work and Leadership:
Vice President of Outreach, Women of Rady (UC San Diego) — Led and co-organized high-profile events including the International Women’s Day celebration at UC Irvine.
Rady x Biotech Leadership event at Illumina — Served on multiple panels and career navigation workshops on campus, at career fairs, and in support of individuals seeking international work opportunities.
President, National University of Singapore Alumni (San Diego Chapter) — Leading the alumni network and fostering connections between NUS graduates and the SoCal life sciences community.
Member, The Vistage Group CEO Development Mentorship Circle — Participated in executive roundtable discussions and supported introductions between CEOs and industry leaders, while actively encouraging classmates to engage with this program.
Mentor & Advocate, World Women Foundation and Women in Engineering Network (San Diego) — Providing career guidance and mentorship to women in STEM.
Venture Capital Engagement — Active in VC Labs; represented Rady at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference and volunteered at multiple VC pitch events.
Cure bound / Pedal the Cause — Led cohort engagement for this UC San Diego-sponsored cancer research fundraiser in partnership with Illumina,
Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? I’m most proud of the tangible industry impact I created for my peers during the EMBA program. By organizing external networking events with leaders from Illumina, Thermo Fisher, Hologic, Eli Lilly, and the NUS alumni network, I facilitated meaningful connections within the life sciences sector that directly led to job placements for fellow students and Rady alumni at Illumina and other leading companies. What makes this achievement especially meaningful is that it wasn’t a classroom assignment — it was self-initiated. I saw a gap between the talent in our cohort and the opportunities available in San Diego’s life sciences ecosystem, and I built the bridges to close it. Helping peers advance their careers while strengthening Rady’s reputation in the industry felt like the most real expression of what an MBA should accomplish.
What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? I’m most proud of being a pioneer employee who helped establish Illumina’s Singapore operations— essentially building multiple operations from the ground up. In San Diego, I built and led teams across Software, Engineering, New Product Introduction (NPI), and Technology Transfer, and supported numerous product launch programs and scale-up efforts across my tenure. Of everything I worked on, the NovaSeq6K- Illumina flagship product launch in 2018 holds a particularly special place. It represented the convergence of everything I had learned: cross-functional leadership, technical depth, operational excellence, and the kind of perseverance that only comes from genuinely caring about the outcome. What this achievement means to me goes beyond the professional milestone. It proved that you could move to a new country, help build something significant from scratch, and grow into a leader through it — and that has shaped every decision I’ve made sense.
Who was your favorite MBA professor? What set Professor Krisztina Büti apart was her ability to make finance genuinely alive. Her teaching style was creative, current, and deeply practical — she had a gift for grounding abstract financial frameworks in real-world examples that made them immediately applicable, not just academically interesting.
What I valued most was how she challenged the way I thought, not just what I knew. Her frameworks around financial decision-making and business performance gave me a new lens through which to view my own work as an engineering leader. Concepts I had previously seen as purely the domain of the CFO’s office — capital allocation, cost structure, how operational decisions translate into financial outcomes — became tools I could actively use.
I came away from her course thinking differently about the engineering investments I champion at Illumina: how I frame ROI for process improvement initiatives, how I evaluate build-versus-buy decisions, and how I connect the operational work my team does every day to the broader financial health of the business. That shift in perspective is exactly what you hope an MBA will deliver — and Professor Büti delivered it.
Why did you choose this school’s Executive MBA program? I chose Rady’s EMBA program because of its unique position at the intersection of San Diego’s world-class life sciences ecosystem and UC San Diego’s research excellence. As someone deeply embedded in the life sciences industry through my work at Illumina, I wanted an MBA that would deepen my business acumen without taking me away from the industry I’m passionate about. Rady’s collaborative culture, its strong connections to biotech and pharma, and the caliber of peers who bring real operational leadership experience to the classroom made it the clear choice. I also wanted to stay and invest in San Diego — a city I believe in — and Rady gave me the platform to do exactly that while also giving back to the community I was building professionally.
Give us a story during your time as an Executive MBA on how you were able to juggle work, family and education: The most honest answer to this question isn’t about a perfectly managed schedule or a productivity hack. It’s about the year I had to hold everything together at once — and the people who helped me do it.
While completing my EMBA, I was navigating one of the most demanding stretches of my career at Illumina while simultaneously supporting my parents through a series of significant challenges. My brother, Ganesh, and I found ourselves leaning on each other in ways we never had before, coordinating across time zones to provide our parents with the stability and support they needed as they moved toward retirement.
What that year taught me is that juggling work, family, and education is less about balance and more about clarity of purpose. I could not have managed without being very honest with myself — and with the people around me — about what mattered most at any given moment. Some weeks, that meant showing up imperfectly in one area so I could show up fully in another.
It also deepened something I hadn’t expected the MBA to give me: perspective. The frameworks I was learning in class about leadership, resilience, and decision-making under uncertainty took on a very different weight when I was living them in real time — not in a case study, but in my family, my team, and my own sense of what I was capable of doing.
What advice would you give to a student looking to enter an Executive MBA program? Go in with intention, not just ambition. The EMBA is not a degree you passively receive — it is an investment that returns exactly what you put into it (and then some if you engage generously). My practical advice: show up to give, not just to get. The most valuable things I gained from Rady came from the moments I helped a classmate navigate a career decision, organized a networking event for the cohort, or connected a professor with an industry expert. Those contributions came back in ways I never anticipated. Also, bring your real work challenges into the classroom. The faculty and your peers are an extraordinary resource — use them. The case studies are great, but your live problems are better.
What was your biggest regret in business school? My biggest regret is not slowing down enough to fully absorb some of the academic content in the earlier months. I came in with a lot of momentum from work and jumped quickly into the extracurricular and community-building aspects of the program, which were rewarding. Occasionally, this came at the cost of deeper engagement with coursework that I later wished I had spent more time on. If I could do it again, I would be more intentional about protecting study time early, before the pace of the program accelerates and the temptation to fill every hour with activity becomes harder to resist.
What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? Rady took a genuinely forward-looking approach to AI integration — not as an add-on, but as a foundational rethink of the curriculum itself. New and refined modules like Data Science with Claude and Consumer Analytics with AI weren’t just introductions to tools; they reframed how I think about data as a strategic asset and how AI can drive better business decisions, not just faster ones.
That shift in mindset arrived at exactly the right moment. Coming in as an engineering leader with deep technical and data analytics experience at Illumina, I already understood AI’s operational potential. What the MBA gave me was the business language and strategic framework to elevate that conversation — from “What can this technology do?” to “what does this technology make possible for the organization?”
I’ve applied that directly. I am currently supporting the launch of Illumina’s first Enterprise AI application, helping to shape the company’s broader enterprise AI strategy. The work requires exactly the combination Rady helped me build technical credibility, cross-functional leadership, and the ability to connect an AI investment to business outcomes in a way that earns executive confidence and organizational buy-in.
The insight I’d highlight is this: AI fluency alone is not a differentiator — it’s becoming a baseline expectation. What sets leaders apart is the ability to translate AI capability into business value, and to bring an organization along on that journey. That is what Rady helped me do.
What was the main reason you chose an Executive MBA program over part-time or online alternatives? The cohort experience was non-negotiable for me. I wanted to learn alongside peers who were in the room with their own hard-won operational and leadership experience — not just study materials online in isolation. The EMBA format also demanded that I commit fully, which I believed would produce better outcomes than a part-time program I might deprioritize during busy work periods. And frankly, the relationships built during an in-person EMBA — with classmates, faculty, and the broader institutional network — are ones you simply cannot replicate asynchronously.
How did you finance your EMBA and what did you do to make tuition and associated costs more affordable? Illumina provided tuition assistance as part of their investment in my professional development — a reflection of the mutual commitment between the company and the leaders it wants to grow. Making that case internally required me to articulate not just the personal value of the degree, but the direct return Illumina would see stronger strategic thinking, broader business acumen, and deeper leadership capability applied immediately back into the organization.
I also received scholarship support from Rady School of Management, which I am genuinely grateful for and take seriously as a responsibility — it reinforced my commitment to give back to the program and the community in ways that go beyond the classroom.
Personal savings covered the remainder. There were no shortcuts, and the financial commitment was real. If anything, having skin in the game across all three sources made me more intentional about extracting every possible ounce of value from the experience.
What is your ultimate long-term professional goal? My long-term goal is to lead at the intersection of life sciences operations and business strategy at a global scale — whether as a senior executive driving operational excellence and innovation at a company like Illumina, or in a role where I can shape the next generation of life science leaders through advisory, board, or investing work. Beyond the title, I want to be known for having made San Diego’s life sciences ecosystem meaningfully stronger — for the companies I worked with, the talent I mentored, and the bridges I helped build between industry, academia, and the broader community. That is the legacy I am working toward.
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