Lori Koch and the careers hiding in plain sight

When Lori Koch returned to Penn State to speak with business students, she noticed a gap in their career plans. Some had a clear destination. Others had a finance education under way and only a partial picture of where it could take them. Beyond Wall Street lay a large working world that deserved a better introduction.

Koch had spent years in that world. She had worked in telecommunications finance, then inside DuPont, where financial decisions meet laboratories, manufacturing operations and customers buying materials for exacting jobs. By 2020 she was chief financial officer. In June 2024, she became chief executive officer. The graduate who had once left Penn State with a finance degree was now responsible for the direction of a global industrial business.

Her response to those student conversations was unusually specific. She and her husband, Greg, committed money to help students explore finance careers outside Wall Street. Career fairs, interview preparation and site visits were among the activities the fund could support. An unfamiliar employer is easier to consider once someone has shown you the door.

There is a useful way to read Koch’s career through that gift. Corporate finance supplied her with an education in how businesses work. She wants students to have a clearer view of that education before choosing where to begin.

A finance degree with several possible exits

Koch graduated from Penn State in 1997 with a bachelor’s degree in finance and international business. She followed it with a master’s in accounting at Babson College in 2000. Finance asks what an investment might become; accounting insists on keeping track of what actually happened. A prospective executive could do worse than learn both languages.

Early roles at Comcast Business Communications and Lucent Technologies put her inside businesses with products, infrastructure and operating decisions to finance. She joined DuPont in 2003. The name would remain on her career history for more than two decades, while the responsibilities beneath it kept changing.

Her work ranged across business units, the science and technology organization, and corporate functions. She led finance for Packaging & Industrial Polymers, Performance Polymers and Performance Materials. The labels sound like rooms in an enormous industrial filing cabinet. They also describe different businesses, each requiring someone to connect technical work with commercial results.

That breadth matters in understanding her eventual appointment. A finance executive inside a materials company has to ask questions across disciplines. What should receive investment? What can a customer use? How long will development take? The numbers acquire meaning through the people and operations behind them. Koch’s career placed her repeatedly at that intersection.

Learning to explain the whole company

In July 2016, Koch became director of investor relations. In June 2019, her responsibilities expanded to vice president of investor relations and corporate financial planning and analysis. After years working within businesses, she was helping communicate the company’s choices to the people investing in it.

Investor relations is an interesting apprenticeship for a future CEO. A financial plan can occupy many spreadsheets; an explanation has to survive questions. The work requires a view across the organization and a command of the relationship between what management promises and what the business delivers.

DuPont gave her substantial material to explain. During the DowDuPont transaction and the subsequent split into three independent companies, she worked on strategy, planning and shareholder engagement. The corporate map was being redrawn. Knowing the individual businesses and understanding the overall plan were both useful qualifications.

On February 18, 2020, DuPont named her CFO, effective immediately, as Ed Breen returned to the CEO role. The announcement described a need to improve operational performance. Koch’s new job began with a clear expectation that financial leadership would help produce operating results.

Her remit widened again in November 2022, when she also took responsibility for DuPont’s corporate businesses, focused primarily on the electric vehicle market. By then, the work already extended beyond the conventional picture of a CFO’s desk. Her path toward general management had become visible in the responsibilities she carried.

The handover came with a changing map

DuPont announced the succession in May 2024. Koch would become CEO on June 1. Breen would become full-time executive chairman. Antonella Franzen, then finance chief of the Water and Protection segment, would become CFO. The arrangement placed Koch alongside colleagues who already knew the business and its financial machinery.

In her public reflection on taking the job, Koch thanked colleagues past and present. She described DuPont as a company that had been her professional home for more than two decades. Her list of the work ahead included clean water, lower carbon footprints and protecting workers. It was a statement of purpose rooted in the products and customers around her.

She was also taking charge during another change in the company’s boundaries. The initial plan called for separating electronics and water into independent businesses. In January 2025, DuPont revised that plan: water would stay. The company had evaluated its alternatives and decided that retaining the business offered the better route to value.

That revision is a revealing part of the assignment. Running a company through change includes deciding which announced changes should proceed. The electronics separation did proceed, creating Qnity on November 1, 2025. In April 2026, DuPont completed the sale of its Aramids business to Arclin. The company Koch led was taking a different shape.

For a longtime finance executive, these decisions have familiar ingredients: investment, cash, business fit and future earnings. As CEO, she carries responsibility for how those ingredients work together. The company name remains familiar; the work underneath it demands a fresh explanation.

What a useful tool should do

At the Economic Club of New York in December 2025, Koch discussed her career with AnnaMaria DeSalva. The conversation covered ambition, mentors and advocating for oneself. It also brought her to a newer management question: what artificial intelligence should actually do inside DuPont.

Her examples were concrete. A sales team could use material specifications to identify prospects it had not considered. Research and development teams could look for ways to shorten development cycles. Other functions could examine where the tools would make their daily work more productive.

This is a sensible place for a corporate discussion of AI to begin. Salespeople need relevant customers; developers need time to move ideas forward. The value of a tool becomes easier to examine when the job is specified first. A grand technology presentation is less helpful if nobody can identify Monday morning’s task.

Koch also emphasized making the technology understandable to employees. Adoption has a human side: people need to see how a tool fits their work. That concern sits comfortably beside her public emphasis on mentoring. Both require someone to make unfamiliar possibilities easier to see and use.

Two funds, two different obstacles

Her work with Penn State gives that attention to opportunity a tangible form. Koch serves on Smeal’s Board of Visitors, which advises the dean and other college administrators. When her appointment was announced in 2023, she described returning in this capacity as a personal milestone.

“Joining the Board of Visitors is a full-circle moment for me.”

Lori Koch, 2023

The family’s $250,000 commitment divided the problem of career access into two parts. A $150,000 finance scholarship would help undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The remaining $100,000 would support the Koch Finance Career Exploration Fund. One fund helps with the cost of studying. The other helps students investigate what to do with that study.

By spring 2024, Smeal was describing a new Corporate Finance Boot Camp supported by the career exploration fund. Its design combined meetings with professionals, guidance on job searches and workplace expectations, and an advanced financial modeling course. Students would get both contact with practitioners and work on technical skills.

The planned curriculum included Excel programming, Python and SQL. Future plans also included company visits, competitions and an alumni network that could mentor and recruit participants. For students trying to understand corporate finance, the program offered several ways to encounter it before making a career commitment.

Leaving the next door open

Koch had spoken publicly about the importance of mentors before she became CEO. In a 2021 post about girls pursuing finance, she credited both women and men with helping her develop the skills to lead a finance organization. Her account of advancement included other people’s time and attention.

That is an appealing detail in a career now easily reduced to a succession of senior titles. The public record contains a slower process: education, operating businesses, investor conversations, broader responsibilities and colleagues who helped along the way. The scholarship and exploration fund extend that process to students beginning their own working lives.

Her current task at DuPont remains measurable. In August 2026, the company reported second-quarter sales of $1.819 billion and organic sales growth of 4 percent, and raised its full-year outlook. Those results belong to a business and its workforce. The responsibility for explaining the direction now belongs to Koch.

For a student considering finance, her example adds another possible destination to the map. A degree can lead into a business that makes things, and into decisions about what that business should become. Koch has spent much of her career doing that work. Her university gift gives the next student a better chance of finding it.