Kate’s journey into STEM advocacy began with the Girl Scouts, where she developed a passion for championing women, children, justice and the environment. She ended up in her high school’s engineering programme almost by accident - due to a scheduling mix-up - but quickly fell in love with the hands-on, practical side of how things work.
During the California wildfires in 2020, while stuck at home during the pandemic, Kate watched planes flying overhead, dropping pink fire-retardant powder onto the flames below. This sparked her curiosity, and she fell down a research rabbit hole into sustainability and new technology.
“Representation matters enormously - any girl, anywhere, should be able to open a book and see someone who looks like her.”
At just sixteen years old, Kate achieved something extraordinary: she wrote and published a book called “Portraits of Perseverance: The Big Book of Two Hundred Women in STEM.” To create it, Kate reached out to hundreds of women working in STEM fields around the world during the pandemic, asking them about their journeys, the challenges they’d faced, and how they’d overcome them. Over four hundred women responded - meaning Kate effectively gained four hundred role models through the process of writing her book!
Kate is now a first-year student at Cornell University, studying Mechanical Engineering, with plans to one day open her own firm bringing sustainable technology to the business world.