Today is Ada Lovelace Day and we will be sharing inspirational stories and figures all day long.

To kick it off we are going to take a look at Pooja Chandrashekar. Pooja is a Biomedical Engineering Fulbright Scholar and advocate for equality.

I recently graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in Biomedical Engineering and minor in Global Health and Health Policy. My work has focused on the intersection of healthcare and technology; projects I have co-founded include a virtual reality intervention to improve the interpersonal skills of autistic adolescents, and a system that leverages online data to predict environmental crises before they occur.

My research spans medical device development, health informatics, and clinical data science. At Boston Children’s Hospital, I leveraged social media data to understand population-level health trends. I also used clinical text data to identify high-risk patients. Through these experiences, I realized that advances in health information technology have little value on their own. I believe that digital health innovation must be accompanied by health system innovation; to improve the health of vulnerable populations, we must improve the access, quality, and cost of care.

In 2016, while still a freshman at Harvard, Pooja gave a TED talk on Youth Changemakers! Check it out:

Learn more about Ada Lovelace Day form Finding Ada:

There are very few women role models in STEM, a problem which becomes clear when you look at the speaker lists for conferences, or the people presenting and featured in TV documentaries, or the pundits chosen to talk about news stories, or the experts and entrepreneurs profiled in magazines and newspapers. It’s difficult to name the women excelling in STEM because they are all but invisible.

An achievable goal
Ada Lovelace Day aims to address this problem by encouraging people to shine a light on the women in STEM that they admire. By talking about women in these fields, we hope to raise not just their profiles, but the profile of every woman. We hope that, through taking part in Ada Lovelace Day and through reading the profiles others have published, everyone will learn about the amazing achievements of our unsung heroines. Many of our most successful women have never been given the credit they deserve, overshadowed by the men that they worked with for no better reason than that it was just “how things were”. And many of the women working in STEM today go unnoticed and unremarked, despite the fact that there is no good reason to ignore their contributions.

You can read more, find events, and get involved!

Today is Ada Lovelace Day! Today the world celebrates all of the accomplishments of women in science, art, design, technology, engineering, and math. Each year, Adafruit highlights a number of women who are pioneering their fields and inspiring women of all ages to make their voices heard. Today we will be sharing the stories of women that we think are modern day “Adas” alongside historical women that have made impacts in science and math.

Please promote and share #ALD18 with your friends and family so we can promote and share with all of the world wide web!