Arya Azma

Biography

My travels have taken me all over our state, country, and continent. I have broken bread with some of the richest and some of the poorest people in our hemisphere. My experiences provide a unique perspective into labor, natural resources, and immigration. I believe that the wisest path forward for our state and our nation is to cultivate strong partnerships within the Americas.

Between semesters at MIT, I assisted research at the National Weather Center in Norman, built an electric vehicle with MIT’s Electric Vehicle Team, spent months constructing houses in South America, interned at a United States embassy, worked for a Pentagon official, and found my way into a Wall Street analyst role. After graduating with an engineering degree, I traded stock options on behalf of an investment bank before getting hired to buy and sell bonds for a hedge fund in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I was born and raised in central Oklahoma. My dad studied business and he works at a restaurant on the east side of Norman. My mom is an engineer for the Air Force at Tinker. My sister is a writer with an office in downtown Norman. Our family lived in the Kraettli apartments on the University of Oklahoma campus before moving to a house when I was four.