Vanesa A.

Vanesa Aguay is an Ecuadorian-American high school senior in Reading, PA. Passionate about using technology to reduce inequities, her passions lie in the intersection of electrical engineering, computational neuroscience, and philosophy. She has published neurophysiology research conducted with a team at Carnegie Mellon and is the founder of Luna Co, a bluetooth app to improve quality of life. Upon growing up as the only Latina in all her classes since middle school, she sought to empower indigenous students with a global community. She founded uBridge, a 501(c)(3) international nonprofit on a mission to bridge diversity gap in technology fields with an entrepreneurial-thinking based philosophy. uBridge has reached 1,200+ youth with educational content in Spanish, engineering kits, and workshops around the world. The uCoalition initiative seeks to build a global community of youth change-makers as a collaboration hub in 6+ countries. As an AI ethicist, Vanesa sought to encourage diversity of both thought and people in the algorithmic process, and seeing virtually no resources about AI for hispanic youth, she wrote and published "Hola Mundo: Inteligencia Artificial" in Spanish. The 100+ pages teaches the fundamentals of neural nets and encourages critical thinking about AI by exploring interdisciplinary insights guided by the book's character Luz. Luz is inspired by Vanesa's grandmother who left the rural Andes mountains so her dad could be the first in his family to graduate high school in Quito. She is excited to continue her research in college by pursuing electrical engineering and computer science and, one day, to create a company that will improve AI-enabled neuro-diagnosis to bridge medical disparities. In her free time, she loves winning Just Dance, playing Ecuadorian pasillos on the piano, and coding websites for local organizations.