Bay Area Team - Director of Operations, Bryan Johnston

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Arron Alexander
5 years ago
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1 Subscribe Iridescent Send to a Friend This year promises to be a pivotal one for Iridescent! We are expanding to three sites (New York City, San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles) and are building a stellar core team. Some of the new team members introduce themselves in this newsletter. Bay Area Team - Director of Operations, Bryan Johnston I first heard about Iridescent when I was in Los Angeles a coupleyears ago. With a B.S. in biomedical engineering from USC, having worked in development for startups and academia, and with a strong interest in working with under-privileged/served communities, the Iridescent mission was up my alley. I remember distinctly thinking 'that sounds really cool,' but I was leaving town headed to the east coast and couldn't get involved. Relocating to the bay area early this year and looking for interesting projects, I was referred by a mutual contact to Tara and Anu. I came on board as a volunteer for Iridescent Bay Area to help set up an internship program and work on some other development stuff. At the time, the first-ever Technovation Challenge pilot program was underway, and you could feel this incredible energy, that feeling when you know you've stumbled onto something really great. Before long, funding came through and I was hired as Director of Operations, Iridescent Bay Area. Soon after, the pilot program ended with a bang at Pitch Night, and we've been on quite a roll ever since, getting some great press, a lot more funding, plans to develop a middle school-based program, an advanced high school program, a compressed weekend program, and expansion plans that include reaching all parts of the bay area this summer and going national in the school year. My goals with Iridescent are to maintain the momentum and grow the program through sustainable partnerships and infrastructure, bringing the Technovation Challenge programs to as many needy kids as possible. It's hard not to be excited about the direction we're moving. Bay Area Team - Director of Curriculum, Margaret Butler Once upon a time, there was a girl (well, maybe more like a woman) who was wondering what the next stage in her life should be. This woman (I'll call her "Margaret") had had many

2 adventures in her life. She had spent many formative years in the fantasy land called Berkeley where she accumulated many pieces of paper. When she could no longer accumulate paper, she began to walk down the corporate road. The corporate road had many twists and turns: she spent time with Apple; she skipped through a startup adventure; she visited Microsoft; but the most fun was sitting in the Sun. At one point, she took a break from sitting in the Sun to return to school, where she shared Java with young minds-- not Java the coffee which young people experience plenty of these days, but Java the magical computer language. These many adventures gave her a strange past and she often wondered where her path would lead next. Then Fairy Princess Anu found her and realized that Margaret's strange past was a perfect match for her new adventure: Technovation Challenge. Fairy Princess Anu needed someone to develop the technical part of Technovation: she already knew what to do for the innovation and entrepreneurship parts. Margaret loved learning new things, so although she knew nothing about mobile phone technology, she embraced the opportunity to learn all about it and to share her new found knowledge with young women. You see, Margaret had a passion for many years to be a role model for young women and to encourage more women to embrace their inner-geek. Under the inspiration of Fairy Princess Anu, Margaret studied the magic of mobility and spread her inner-geekness to many young women. The Technovation Challenge was so successful that Queen Tara saw an opportunity to bring out the inner-geekness of many more people. Queen Tara took her vision to the Gods who rule the seas and convinced them of the value of encouraging even younger people to embrace their inner-entrepreneur&geek. The sea Gods said to Queen Tara "Go forth and create entrepreneurial geeks who love science." Margaret now has a new mission: combining Science with technology and innovation and spreading this throughout the kingdom. beginning... The Technovation team has many adventures ahead: Technovation Science Challenge, the Technovation Express Challenge (compressing the challenge into a weekend so young women can embrace their inner-geek much more quickly), the Advanced Technovation Challenge (what do we do with all these geeks who can't get enough technovation?), and of course, more of the original Technovation Challenge. Although, every great fairy tale ends happily ever after, this adventure is really just Link to the Technovation Challenge New York City Team - Engineering Education Director, Erika Allison Hi, I'm Erika! While completing a very male-dominated mechanical engineering program at The University of Texas at Austin, I became passionate about encouraging more females to pursue careers in engineering. After working several years in industry, I left the corporate world to join the New York City Teaching Fellows, where I taught math and physics to an underserved population at an all-girls public high school. I first discovered Iridescent while searching for hands-on engineering activities to do with my

3 students. I was so inspired by Tara's energy and vision that I volunteered to help start the Iridescent site in NYC while teaching full-time and completing my Masters degree in Education at night! During these first several months, we forged a partnership with The Cooper Union, trained a couple of their brightest engineering students, and piloted a Family Science Workshop at my school in East Harlem. It's been amazing to see Iridescent NYC go from just a dream of expansion to a fully-funded science education program. The need for high-quality, hands-on science education, positive family interaction, and engineering visibility is so urgent in many NYC communities, and it is my personal goal to help Iridescent become the vehicle that brings these empowering opportunities to our most underserved populations. I hope to inspire current engineering students to become role models to the next generation of future engineers, and to help foster curiosity, excitement, and confidence in these young science learners! Video of Erika impersonating Galileo and teaching her students about Newton's Laws :) New York City Team - Partnerships and Operations Director, Jennifer Hsu I had returned from 6 months in Africa and Europe and was eagerto get involved with a high-impact, innovative nonprofit. I started off with Iridescent compiling parent survey data, but soon found myself giving presentations at Back-to-School Nights, Family Science Workshops and other initiatives! It was so impressive to see what a positive, grassroots, and high-impact organization this was - it was the type of organization where the more I became involved, the more I wanted to be involved! Four months later, I moved back to my hometown of New York and was delighted to discover the possible expansion of Iridescent into New York. It is great to see such an excellent program take root on the east coast, where it is even more needed! I come to Iridescent with a wide splatter of experiences, but what perhaps most define me are my degree in molecular biology, my understanding of finance and economics, and my addiction to volunteering and service. I am looking forward to providing one of the most thoughtful, high-impact and attractive non-profit programs to New York City and to creating the distinct voice/face of Iridescent NYC as well as growing both our audience and sponsorship base.

4 Los Angeles Team - Regional Director, Vanessa Garza While putting my career on the back burner for some Mommy & Me time with my daughter, Vida, I grew restless. I decided to cautiously and strategically search job boards for a place and a position that fit my original mission in education. Iridescent had a posting in Teach For America s job board and I began to volunteer in February I launched a Family Science pilot at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) with their Family Of Schools. We conducted a month of Family Science courses in April 2010 with 3 school sites, myself, and an army of awesome volunteers. The response was so wonderful that the parents were eager to learn about summer opportunities with Iridescent before our plans were in place! My previous work as a charter school administrator and LAUSD 6th grade math and earth science teacher prepared me well for the pilot launch. I still have so much to learn, I feel I have already grown and learned lessons in the short time I have been with Iridescent. Some personal goals I have are to gain proficiency with high-level proposal writing and leveraging key partnerships for the organization. In the short-term, I look forward to a successful fall semester as a co-instructor for the Engineers As Teachers course at USC and hopefully expanding to LMU in the spring. Vanessa leading the Engineering KidZ Design Challenge at LMU Iridescent Board Member - Prof. Shri Narayanan We have been collaborating with Prof. Narayanan over the past three years and are so excited to have him on our board of directors. Prof. Narayanan is a Professor at the Signal and Image Processing Institute of USC's Electrical Engineering department and holds joint appointments as Professor in Computer Science, Linguistics and Psychology. He was a Research Area Director of the Integrated Media Systems Center, an NSF Engineering Research Center at USC, and was the Research Principal for the USC Pratt and Whitney Institute for Collaborative Engineering, a unique partnership between academia and industry ( ). He holds the first Viterbi Professorship in Engineering at USC. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award, USC Engineering Junior Research Award, USC Electrical Engineering Northrop-Grumman Research award, a Mellon award for mentoring excellence, an Okawa Research Award, an IBM Faculty Award and a faculty fellowship from the USC Center for Interdisciplinary research. His research interests are in signals and systems modeling with an interdisciplinary emphasis on speech, audio, language, multimodal and biomedical problems and applications with direct societal relevance. Hiring a Recruiting Director, Los Angeles We are looking to hire a recruiting director for our Los Angeles site.

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Welcome! Our Mission

Welcome! Our Mission Like Tweet 0 Welcome! Welcome to our monthly newsletter! The Technovation Challenge is gearing up for an exciting program this year in six sites across the country. We aim to serve 300 high school girls