Today's Inspiring Women of STEM (Part 2)

The goal of this “Inspiring Women in STEM” series is to encourage your female students to push society’s limit and increase women representation in STEM .  These areas are highly male-dominated because of many different factors, so it’s important our girls feel inspired and can see themselves in these roles!
 
In case you missed it, Inspiring Women in STEM: part 1 shares three inspiring woman breaking boundaries set in our society. 
 
 
Female Representation Matters
 
Everyone knows Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin, but they don’t know the women who have made important contributions to the STEM field.  According to Forbes, women are underrepresented in textbooks that feature STEM leaders, and in STEM corporate boards and organizations.
 
 “Only 16% of women were on corporate boards in 2016. Companies must make a concerted effort to have more female leadership and board members represented in the organization.”
 
 
Inspiring Women in stem
 
Here are 3 more inspiring women in STEM.  Consider printing this page and making copies for your students, or pull it up on the SMART board at the beginning of class.  Whatever is the easiest way to inform your students of the powerful women who have made progress in a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics field!
 
Alissa Chavez
 
Remezcla tells us about the inspiring Alissa Chavez, who patented new technology at just 17 years old!  She grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico and came up with an amazing idea for a science fair project.
 
She invented the “Hot Seat”, to prevent babies from dying of heat stroke if locked in a hot car.  The product includes a pad that is placed inside a car seat or booster seat as well as an alarm in a car, keychain and app that are activated as the heat of the pad rises.”
 
 “It’s loud enough to grab people’s attention around the vehicle, as well as remind the parent on their key fob or their cell phone,” Chavez told NBC in 2014.  She started a small business creating products for children, called Assila (her name backwards).

 
Laura Boykin
 
TED Blog shares that the cassava crops in East Africa have suffered from African whitefly infestations for decades; it has been a huge battle for the farmers, because cassava is so widely relied on for meals around the world. 
 
Laura Boykin, a computational biologist, gathered data using genomics, supercomputing and evolutionary history. With the data, now publicly available via WhiteFlyBase , she hopes to help researchers breed new strains of cassava that resist the whitefly.
 
When asked how she became drawn to this subject, she replied, “I worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory for about four years. That was my first exposure to a supercomputer. I analyzed influenza and hepatitis C sequence data, to find clues to give the CDC about vaccines — on what strains could potentially be the next outbreak in the population. Those sorts of skills are invaluable for work with insects, because they invade the ecosystem like viruses invade our bodies.”

Nina Tandon
 
Her Campus tells us about Nina Tandon, an American biomedical engineer with her MBA and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University, an MS in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from Cooper Union.
 
Tandon is the CEO and co-founder of EpiBone, "the world's first company growing bones for skeletal reconstruction." She studies ways to use electrical signals to grow artificial tissues for transplants and other therapies.  As if this isn’t enough, she is also the co-author of Super Cells: Building with Biology and in 2012, was named a TED senior fellow.
 
 
So I don’t know about you, but I find these 3 women, as well as the women in Part 1 incredibly inspiring!
 
Stay tuned for Part 3 where we will dive into three more inspiring women in STEM history!
 
 

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