Join the conversation on STEM education and help nurture the next generation of visionaries

@Alison Clancy She is true hero! Did you ever see the documentary on her work? Her quiet approach to working with the animals and being able to watch them for hours was inspiring.

How wonderful it is to see a community of people so positively impacted by the work of women in STEM. I'm inspired by the hard work and diligence of Ms. Christina Koch, a graduate from NC State who is a NASA astronaut. I specifically love this news article. https://news.ncsu.edu/2023/04/were-headed-for-the-moon/ She recently spoke at one of our Red Chair chats for Red and White night and it was great to hear her speak about her experiences as a women in STEM.

I've always been inspired by Oprah Winfrey. She has the ability to empower women in such powerful ways. She helps them find and magnify their uniqueness to be fully themselves and empower those around them. She leverages the unique talents of others to remove barriers for all women in STEM and other career paths.

I am inspired by one of the great female STEM leaders from the 21st century with an interesting story about two companies we know very well and are large competitors of one another. Marissa Mayer began her career as Google's first female software engineer, in the largely male dominated region of Silicon Valley, and she was the designer of Google's search interface. She has been given credit for the increased spike in amount of searches on the Google platform from the technologies inception in the late 1990's to 5 years later. She also helped develop and provide the community with Gmail, Google Chrome, Google Maps, and Google Earth, which we all probably use one of those product offerings at least once a day.

After all of Mayer's work at Google, she left in 2012 to be the first female CEO of Yahoo! Inc. She helped restructure and reinvent the search engine of Yahoo!, leading the company to be more profitable and the largest competitor of Google at the time. Marissa Mayer stayed at Yahoo! until the company was sold to Version Communications in 2017. She then decided to create a consumer apps start up named Sunshine (formerly known as Lumi), which utilizes intelligent algorithms to helps consumers automate tasks and save time. Besides running Sunshine, she serves on a plethora of boards of organizations, including Walmart and the Forum of Young Global Leaders, and is an advocate for women in STEM. Mayer continues to promote that girls should be looking for opportunities to learn coding, to express their femininity, and to aim for excellence in technology and engineering.

“Every day was a new problem and every day you got to think about how to solve something new, how to reason through something new, how to develop an algorithm to solve for something you hadn't worked on before.” - Marissa Mayer

I am going to second @Ray Lindstrom on his post about Katherine G. Johnson. Unfortunately, I did not stumble across this hero until watching "Hidden Figures" and that was only because of my fangirl of "Cookie Lyon". After watching that and digging into who Creola Katherine Johnson gave me a stronger appreciation for her efforts.

This is such an incredible community! I was extremely blessed to join the Women in Action ERG from Dell at the annual Girlstart luncheon in Austin, TX. I was so impressed with all the volunteers, board and wonderful participants. As a girl mom and someone who was always encouraged not to worry about school because I just "needed to find a good husband so I could stay home with the kids," I love what this organization stands for and the work they are doing to bring fun and exciting STEM programs to girls all over the world!

The women I have the honor to work with at my current biotechnology company are my inspiration. They are intelligent, agile, strong leaders with a powerful presence both in the office and in their communities.

I have to say I am so inspired by Dr.Francine Patterson and her work with Koko and animal psychology. Having a close relationship with ASL find it so amazing that she could take an infant gorilla and raise it to understand and communicate through ASL with over 1000 words. Taking the time to fully understand and look at what can be explored in this field and to show the extraordinary aptitude Koko had for the language. One of the first attempts at teaching animals human languages and being successful. This then allowed Patterson to go on to be able to learn about gorillas and their emotions and then shifting her work from purely research to then applied research to help both captive and wild gorillas.

Being in a home where ASL is used daily it amazes me how just any language is beautiful in its own way. But when you are impaired how this language becomes who you are and thus makes the language even more beautiful. My daughter at a year was already communicating with my husband and I on a basic level but helped us better understand her needs. Cant speak enough about this work and ASL!