Vadim Hettena

Global Challenge: Influencing Climate Change through Mathematical Modeling

Bio:

Vadim grew up in Albany, NY, where he learned to love mathematics, music and the trombone. He moved to Olympia, Washington, where he learned to sail Laser sailboats with his high school team and continued to advance his trombone playing in the Student Orchestras of Greater Olympia and Tacoma Youth Symphony Association. To complement his quantitative Physics and Mathematics foundation with strategic commercial acumen, Vadim added a Business Minor at NYU Stern. Outside the classroom, he balances his analytical rigor with artistic discipline as Principal Bass Trombonist for the NYU Symphony and the NW Mahler Festival.

At NYU this semester, Vadim is actively involved with Rogue Aerospace on the flight dynamics recovery subteam. His prior professional experience off-campus includes completing a Summer Technical Fellowship at AISUM—evaluating market dynamics and presenting strategic insights to executive leadership—and stress-testing pre-release LLMs for DataAnnotation Technologies. Through these technical roles and his ensemble leadership as a principal musician, he has cultivated strong skills in data forecasting, executive presentation, Python modeling, and peer mentorship. Post-graduation, his short-term goal is to launch a career in an analytics role, with a long-term vision of leveraging data-driven insights to make high-impact decisions.

Studying abroad at NYU London broadened Vadim’s musical perspective on a global scale, where he performed Holst’s The Planets with a community orchestra and many staples in the classical repertoire with a community brass band. Over the past year, he successfully completed four of his GLASS program components: writing a mathematical research paper on the exponential function e^x, and completing a data analytics certificate course for academic excellence, studying abroad in London for global competency, and undertaking his 7-week AISUM Technical Fellowship for professional development.

To Vadim, being part of the GLASS program means uniting STEM expertise with global citizenship to address systemic worldwide challenges. UN Sustainable Development Goals 13 (Climate Action) and 4 (Quality Education) resonate most deeply with him; SDG 13 drives his commitment to applying data analysis toward raising awareness for global warming, while SDG 4 is personal, shaped by seeing school district budget cuts back home erode the quality of music education.