From First Republic to Turkey's 1st female central bank head, Erkan has come a long way in her career

livemint.com:

real estate lender called Greystone alongside its founder. Her resignation after a few months late last year opened the door to her role shepherding an economy an ocean away. ‘Best Student’ Erkan has now returned to where her ascent began.

She was born in Istanbul to an engineer dad and a mom who taught math and physics, according to a First Republic biography that’s still online. It says that her college named her not just valedictorian but “Best Student in the Last Ten Years." In 2005, just before getting a Ph.D. in operations research and financial engineering from Princeton, she started work at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.  Marty Chavez, a former top executive there who’s now vice chairman of Sixth Street Partners, said their careers both benefited from good timing.  “We were both on Wall Street at a time when people with our skill set were embraced," he said.

“We went from ‘Can you help me turn the computer on?’ to ‘We can do really great things for our clients with math and computers.’" It helped, he added, that “we’re good at math, and we’re good at software, and that’s a gift."  As Goldman was cutting jobs in 2011, it promoted the fewest colleagues in years to the coveted rank of managing director. Erkan was one of them. First Republic Jim Herbert, the First Republic boss who still loomed large over the bank decades after founding it, met Erkan while interviewing bankers to help build a risk-management program.