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feministfocus · 1 year

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Girls Receive National STEM Awards

by Helena Donato-Sapp

Issues and concerns about women and girls in STEM have been hot topics for quite a while now. As recently as one month ago (September 19, 2022) Ms. Magazine’s Camille Steward and Lauren Zabierek wrote about Tennisha Martin, the founder of BlackGirlsHack, a nonprofit focused on getting more women of color into the field of cybersecurity. But as early as 1976, Ms. Magazine was also writing about “math anxiety” and the tendency of women to avoid mathematics. As long as we have been fighting for our rights as women, issues about equity in regard to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics have been a part of our conversation and our movement.

That’s why I am especially proud to introduce you to a group of young girls making a tremendous impact in the area of STEM. Full disclosure – I am proudly one of the awardees! Thus, I’ll tell you a little bit about myself before I introduce you to my brilliant STEM-sisters (and a few STEM-brothers) in this inaugural class of STEM awardees.

The award is from The 74, which is a relatively new nonprofit organization that covers America’s education system from early childhood through college and career. (3). In March they had a call for nominations for the inaugural class of “16 Under 16 in STEM” award. They asked their readership to help identify 16 of “the most impressive students who are 16 years of age or younger who have shown extraordinary achievement in STEM-related activities.” (3) Sixteen honorees were selected by a panel of judges who work across several STEM fields. The 16 honorees were notified on August 1st.

Why did I receive the award? You can read about my early love of science and some of the things I’ve done here. I would say that one of the reasons I am included among this extraordinary peer group is that I am a child scholar and activist – now a youth scholar and activist because I just turned 13 years old – and have published rigorous scholarly work and am a much-sought-after speaker and activist. My work is all the more impressive when you know that I have multiple learning disabilities, which is also why one of my areas of scholarship is Disability Justice. Indeed, my learning disabilities are a science area in and of itself as I dig deeply into what it means to have neurodiversity as one of my multiple identities.

I am so proud to be a part of the first class of “16 Under 16 in STEM” and I’m happy to tell you that 11 of the 16 are girls! Let me introduce these brilliant young STEM-sisters:

Aesha Bhatt (12) from Johns Creek, GA: Aesha immigrated to the U.S. from India five years ago. During the pandemic when we were all locked down and opportunities seemed thin, Aesha engaged with BYJU’s FutureSchool, which is an online technology and coding program for youth. For her capstone project, she created an app that allows students to digitally report instances of bullying. She had witnessed her peers get harassed in school but also that they were afraid to speak to teachers and administration and she felt that a tech-based approach might increase the chance of getting bullying reported. Her Anti-Abuse App is available for download on the Google Play Store and she is working on getting it picked up by Apple’s App Store. It’s great that Aesha wanted to help her peers feel safer at school and I feel this is especially important since I have been bullied a lot at school myself. I’ve already reached out to Aesha to learn more about her app and how we can use it at our own school since one of the things our GLI club is doing this year is an anti-bullying campaign.

Lydia Denton (14) from Wilson, NC: Lydia is a girl after our own hearts because she is on a mission to get more girls interested in STEM. She has life-threatening allergies and suffers from severe anxiety and her response to these concerns is to use them as the fuel for inventions. One invention of hers is the Halcyon Bracelet which recognizes recurrent movements associated with anxiety and gives the wearer a warning signal. She also invented a Beat the Heat Car Seat that can tell when a child has been left in a car and initiates a call to emergency services to rescue them. Lydia also co-founded Regame, Inc., which is a nonprofit that collects, repairs, and redistributes used gaming systems and tablets to keep them from being dumped in landfills. She regularly speaks to schools and programs for girls to encourage more female interest and representation in STEM.

Vanesha Hari (16) from Redmond, WA: Vanesha was a counselor-in-training for a program that had the purpose of igniting girls’ curiosity for math and that is where she saw a pretty major problem. The girls, she found out, thought math was not only boring but also that boys were better at math than girls. A second experience that impacted her were trips to India with her family where she witnessed girls giving up their opportunities for education so that they could work and support their families. These two experiences led her and her sister, Varshini, to co-found Joys of Giving, a nonprofit with the dual mission to fight youth hunger and close gaps in educational equity. A major goal of Joys of Giving is to encourage more girls to go into STEM fields. Vanesha has led more than two dozen STEM workshops and engaged hundreds of girls in coding, science, baking, and art.

Chelsea Hu (16) from McLean, VA: Chelsea is the daughter of an Asian immigrant family and spent much of her childhood moving around the country as her parents looked for work. She found that STEM was always a place where she could express and affirm important cultural experiences and find a sense of belonging. She saw rapid urbanization in her neighborhood in Virginia and how it was causing hazardous bank erosion which, in turn, was endangering the health and diversity of local habitats. That led her to an interest in the eastern skunk cabbage because that plant reminded her of vetiver, a similar plant her ancestors used to stabilize rice paddies. Because she is an International Science and Engineering Fair medalist, she has the platform to share her work with many communities to combat these harmful trends of urbanization and mismanaged stormwater. She is also a researcher at the Paranjape Lab at Georgetown University where she is heading a project on using silk fibroin microspheres to improve drug delivery in the lungs of infants who have a respiratory disease. But wait…there is more! She has seen that a lot of her peers are struggling with mental health issues and so she founded Teen Mobile Arts, a global nonprofit that builds communities for young underrepresented artists around the world in response to these mental health issues.

Pinyu Liao (16) from Kenmore, VA: When Pinyu’s grandmother died of a bacterial infection, it inspired her to study antibiotic resistance. She started her research project from her bedroom and is now working with the Research Science Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She acquired funding and produced a documentary, The Quest to Stop Antibiotic Resistance, which was selected to be part of the World Health Organization’s Health for All Film Festival. Pinyu shares her work through her blog, Lavender + Lab Coats, which gets over 35,000 views a month.

Garima Rastogi (16) from Concord, NH: Garima lives and breathes math. When she was in middle school she co-published a peer-reviewed research paper on probability games, presented to the American Junior Academy of Science on using machine learning to count microscopic worms, and co-published a paper on “The Stable Matching Problem and Sudoku.” She and her siblings co-founded the Rastogi MatheMagicians Club at their local library where they mentor elementary and middle school students who have an interest in competitive math.

Cloris Shi (15) from Fullerton, CA: Cloris conducted research using machine learning methods to analyze the mutations of the receptor-binding domain of six different coronaviruses. Her project, “Analysis of the Amino Acid Frequencies in the Receptor-Binding Domains of Six Coronaviruses,” was recognized in the national Broadcom MASTERS top 300 projects and she was awarded a scholarship for it. She also founded her school chapter of STEAM for All, which is a nonprofit that wants to foster more interest in STEAM fields.

Harita and Sharada Suresh (15 & 13) from Jersey City, NJ: Harita and Sharada have always loved technology and they started learning how to code when they were 5 years old. They quickly saw that there were barriers in technology fields, though, that were based on gender, race, geography, and income. They launched Little Apple Academy, a nonprofit that offers free live coding classes online to other young people. When the pandemic hit and schools closed, the Suresh sisters led coding classes online that attracted students from around the world, and now they have taught over 450 students from nine different countries.

Sydney Vaughn (16) from San Jose, CA: Sydney’s interest in medicine comes from her brother who has special needs and has had 20 surgeries since his birth. She states that it was all those years of watching medical professionals care for her brother than was the catalyst for her own interest in medicine today. She lives in San Jose, California where the unhoused population grew by 11% during the pandemic. Sydney led a project to study and tackle how medical care was delivered to her community in San Jose. Her years-long research and planning led to an event where she and her peers – under the guidance of a local physician – provided food, first aid kits, and simple medical care to the unhoused members of the community.

Kavya Venkatesan (15) from Old Bridge, NJ: Kavya is a national ambassador for the Society of Women Engineers, a distinguished leadership ambassador for the Harvard WECode Conference, and a board and council member for New Jersey’s Women’s Future Leadership Academy, which organizes STEM symposiums for underrepresented students. She developed an app, NJX Connect, that connects individuals in low-income coastal communities with flood relief organizations and resources. A second app, Helios, is a heat advisory system that aims to educate users about their risk of being hospitalized from heat stroke.

And don’t forget to read the boys’ profiles too! Steven Hoffen (14), Zidaan Kapoor (15), Elliott Tanner (13), Sanjith Udupa (16), and Samuel Woods (13) are extraordinary and certainly deserved this honor along with the girls you’ve just met.

Like all movements toward justice and equity, we have a long way to go. Today there are lots of amazing organizations that encourage and support girls in STEM. I am proud to be a part of the movement towards justice and equity for girls by being a member of the Feminist Focus Blog Team…as well as being part of the movement for equity and justice for girls in STEM fields with my honor of being a member of the inaugural class of “16 Under 16 in STEM.”

Check out some of these great STEM organizations focused on girls and get involved:

The Alliance for Climate Education https://acespace.org ACE educates, inspires, and supports young people to lead the fight for their future.

Black Girls Code https://wearebgc.org BGC builds pathways for young women of color to embrace the current tech marketplace as builders and creators by introducing them to skills in computer programming and technology.

Black Girls Love Math https://www.blackgirlslovemath.org BGLM addresses racial and gender equality in math.

Latinas in STEM https://www.latinasinstem.com Latinas in STEM help Latinas currently pursuing careers in STEM to thrive.

Women in STEM https://womeninstem.org Women in STEM is about empowering and encouraging high school girls to be a part of the movement to increase female representation in STEM.

#girls in science #girls in stem

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