Building Personal Resilience in Career and Life

​With constant noise in the world, uneven tech job markets, unpredictable funding cycles, and a general spike in uncertainty, being a builder of new things has been hard — even for people who look steady from the outside.

​Two regional leaders — Aurora Solar's Mackenzie Siren and Discovery Partners Institute's Karl Putz, PhD — will share honest lessons from navigating career searches and parenthood before opening the conversation to the room.

​Big 💡: Building Personal Resilience

​Karl Putz, PhD is an innovation executive and systems thinker serving as Associate Director of R&D Programs at Discovery Partners Institute, working across academia, industry, and government to move ambitious ideas forward under real constraints. He pairs strategic thinking with a deeply human approach — most at home solving hard problems with good people.

​Mackenzie Siren is Staff Product Manager at Aurora Solar and cofounder of Chicago Climate Connect, a 2,000+ member community of climate-minded Chicagoans. With over a decade of experience building and scaling data-driven products across B2B, B2C, and marketplace businesses, she helped scale Wyzant through its 2021 acquisition and has since focused on climate work — spanning clean energy, data and AI, food systems, and community building. She brings a grounded perspective on resilience shaped by building through change and more than a few "well, that didn't go as planned" moments.

​We'll explore what resilience looks like in practice, how perspective helps us keep moving, and how we build momentum toward the things we want to make real.