From Amazon to Uber, tech companies are transforming the world for better and worse, improving lives and depleting fossil fuel resources. Part of the “worse” is the widespread exclusion of girls and POC, who provide critical perspectives on the equity of tech solutions. For instance, the exclusion of Native American populations has led to climate mismanagment, and the exclusion of female POC to AI disparities in facial recognition and disease detection. Good thing exclusion has a solution: inclusion. That’s why I started HerComputing. In ninth grade, I began teaching technology education to girls in my local community. I wanted to go a step beyond computer science—many incredible, far-reaching organizations already educate in this field—and show that tech is more than just coding; we need people of all backgrounds: designers, product managers, justice advocates, and so much more. Everyone, with their diverse interests and experiences, belongs and is needed in tech. HerComputing’s first camp encouraged students to work together to create new technologies—an AI recommendation tool, a website where users could share and find shopping wishlists, and more. Students quickly learned the skills that made each of them valuable in a team, from leadership to programming to graphic design. I found that project-based curriculum, with a dash of gamification—from team bonding games to brainstorming games—boosted the student experience! Friends and I brought our program to the Valley Settlement House (VSH), a Title I school in a POC community. We ran after-school tech sessions for six month and fundraised $1000 to build VSH a computer lab, so each student could keep coding, designing, and exploring! Inspired by coding board game creators, we took gamification to the next level, developing Who Wants To Be A Billionaire, a tech board game simulating large-scale tech growth and impact. From forming teams to building products and attracting users, players learn the process of technological development and essential tech concepts. We were so grateful to receive $4000 in donations and pre-orders last year, allowing us to bring the game to life! We then partnered with the CS Teacher’s Association to donate games to libraries and schools nationwide. So what inspires me? Britney, a middle school student, messaging me about a wildfire-detection AI she built after our camp. Kyla, a VSH board game tester, exclaiming that she wanted to go into tech. I know we’re changing lives when I see female POC finally realize their own power to transform tech. When we exclude women and POC, we build half-solutions: algorithms that underperform on female patients, climate models that exclude communities of color. HerComputing invites them back, helping create strong, diverse leaders who’ll collaborate to solve the world’s biggest problems, from affordable healthcare to the climate crisis.

In ninth grade, I viewed AI as a panacea—capable of improving public health, revolutionizing robotics, and monitoring the planet. That summer, I gained hands-on experience programming AI at the Stanford AI4ALL program, where I developed logistic regression models to map human population density with remote sensing data. After the program, I cold-emailed two Penn State University professors, with whom I worked on a project using machine learning to detect Parkinson’s disease from handwriting samples. I first-authored a scientific paper and open-sourced the model. NVIDIA Health featured the research on their blog and social media. My AI experience led me to receive a paid AI research position at Massachusetts General Hospital in tenth grade. During my first lab meeting, I discovered a startling truth: AI could predict a patient’s race from their medical images when human experts could not. Disturbed, I scoured published papers for an explanation, but researchers had yet to find one. Determined to confront this challenge, I began a research investigation. Over 18 months, I trained hundreds of Convolutional Neural Networks, identified image features enabling AI to learn self-reported race, and first-authored a scientific paper. I presented my findings at a Mass General symposium—placing first in the high school division—and later at ARVO, an international conference. I also won first place at the New Hampshire Science and Engineering Exposition. I expanded on my work as a Simons Research Fellow, generating synthetic medical images to augment minority classes in datasets, helping mitigate algorithmic bias. I’ve learned that AI is neither a panacea nor a curse, rather a tool that we must design and use responsibly. Personally, I am committed to developing sustainable AI. My interest in environmental science was first sparked through Science Olympiad, which led me to an internship with NASA’s Earth Science team. Here, I coupled AI with Landcover and LANDSAT data to examine the way residential land responds to rising temperatures. Outside of research, I am the Head of Programming for Exeter Varsity Robotics. This year, I developed a custom library enabling our robot to travel along Bezier curves, improving our robot’s autonomous abilities. Further, as the co-head of Exeter Computing Club, I led a team to develop technology solutions for campus, including a course planning tool. I also achieved USACO Gold and hosted hackathons. These experiences have empowered me as a computer scientist. Now, equipped with a deeper understanding, I look forward to pursuing a P.h.D in computer science and artificial intelligence, with a focus on ethics and sustainability. In my career, I hope to develop socially conscious AI to serve environmental organizations, helping clean up oceans, track endangered animals, and monitor climate. I also aspire to share data, insights, and experiences as a public-facing scientist—a science influencer—who uses her platform to advocate for computer science and climate education. Long term, I plan to become a professor, using my hands-on experience to mentor students as we innovate ethical computational solutions to secure the future of our only planet.