ALEC WALKER'S BIO

Alec Walker attended Choate Rosemary Hall boarding school in Connecticut through his junior year in high school and then was accepted directly into Hampshire College to study applied creativity. He transferred to Rice University and graduated in 2009 with both a BA in Asian Studies and a BS in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering with a scholarship from BP. He spent a semester learning Mandarin Chinese at Capital Normal University in Beijing, and he received additional scholarships to study mining and rural-urban migration in Mongolia. His team won a gold medal at MIT’s International Genetically Engineered Machines competition for their design of a bacteriophage to selectively target antibiotic-resistant bacteria. He worked for a quantum computing research lab in Tokyo, and he also conducted research and took courses at UC Berkeley, Cornell University, and National University of Singapore. He studied and worked in Nigeria and North Korea, and he served as a coordinator for Scientific Collaborations Across Borders under James A. Baker III at the Baker Institute for Public Policy.

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Alec worked for Royal Dutch Shell after his undergraduate matriculation. He began as a catalysis engineer within R&D and moved into technical service engineering with Shell’s externally facing Projects and Technologies Group in Houston. He was elected as Survey Chair for Shell HR during this time, informing Shell US senior leadership of trends and insights emerging from data he captured from surveying employees across the company, and beginning his interest in data science. He then transitioned into software product management, overseeing a third-party software team in the creation and management of a global tech tool to automatically flag and report data from across Shell’s client oil refineries. Alec then worked in Denver as the primary development reservoir engineer for a major onshore upstream asset ($500MM) for two years. He was elected President of the regional Shell New Professionals Network and served in that role for one term before leaving for business school.

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Alec joined the Stanford MBA program in 2013. At Stanford, Alec focused on startup best practices as well as on digital transformation and internal entrepreneurship for multinational companies. He created a successful social networking application for Stanford students, which was adopted by the school. He also created a stock-trading video game with daily active users growing to comprise half of the Graduate School of Business student body, and he worked for a video game startup out of the Y Combinator accelerator program. Alec founded Inly and took on his first two clients while still a graduate student, and he continued to do design thinking, digital transformation, and entrepreneurship consulting and education for multinational corporations while in China for two years following his graduation. Some of Inly’s clients include Intel, Inditex, GM, Swarovski, Sheraton, and URS (now AECOM).