Nathaniel Wade studied to be an engineer before he dived into the entrepreneurial route. He first started off with a property investment business before going on to launch what he believes will be a leading platform for amplifying Black businesses. Wade, 30, launched Wakuda, also dubbed the ‘Amazon’ or ‘Etsy’ for Black businesses with his long-time friend Albert Larter back in September 2020 during the pandemic. This was a time when thousands in the UK were furloughed, some were let go and others were forced to close the doors to
Earlier this year, a two-year-old Thai girl named Matheryn became the youngest person to be cryogenically frozen, preserving her brain moments after death in the hope that she would one day be brought back to life. According to reports, baby Matheryn Naovaratpong, nicknamed Einz, is a patient currently being held at Alcor, an organization currently housing 200 bodies that it hopes to give a second chance of life. The company depends on science and tech to do this. Matheryn died from brain cancer in 2015. Her parents, Nareerat and Sahatorn,
SaLisa Berrien, a Pittsburgh university trustee, has received a $100,000 Black Founders Fund award from Google for Startups. The award will be used to expand her Tampa-based renewable energy services company, COI Energy. Berrien was recognized in 2021 as one of Google’s 30 Black founders to watch. On top of this funding, she has raised over $2 million for her firm which serves customers throughout Florida and 13 mid-Atlantic states. Berrien plans to expand to California in the near future. From working at electric utilities to Smart Grid, Clean Tech, and Big Data
Throughout history, engineering was almost entirely the domain of white men, for example, it was in 1892 that The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had its first African-American graduate, Robert R. Taylor. It was only 25 years later, in 1917, that the university gave its first civil engineering diploma to an African-American. Although we’re in 2022 – the pictures are still relatively similar – white men still dominate the industry. The UK has one of the most male-dominated engineering sectors, Male academic scientists outnumber their female counterparts by two to one
Everyone has a hobby, most people have some sort of passion, and others, like John, have ambition. He was aged 14-years-old when he started “burrowing” his parent’s phones to see how they were made. He would study the compartments of the devices, taking it all in and making notes. Eventually – he taught himself how to code, started making web applications, and created an NFT (non-fungible token) with node, typescript, and solidity. His skill-set gained him wide-spread attention from his friends, who started spreading the word on his services. At
The lack of diversity in the tech world continues to garner headlines and raise questions about the lack of gender representation in the tech workforce. For Latina engineers, the path to success continues to be an uphill battle. Here’s a list of Latina engineers that need to be celebrated Scarlin Hernandez Hernandez is an aerospace engineer working on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. As a spacecraft engineer, an important part of her work is to test the ground systems that will command and control the telescope after it has been
As part of our weekly interviews, POCIT has had the pleasure of interviewing founders who’ve raised millions in capital, social media influencers using their platforms to educate young people looking to get into the tech sector. Now on this series, we’ve sat down with the founder and president of BWISE, a STEM organization already driving robust change for mid to senior-level Black women in tech, engineering, and science.
There have been dozens of stories written this year about people that used lockdown as a way to better themselves or to learn a new and beneficial skill but I don’t think many have had the privilege of hearing Asia Sharif’s story. The proudly Black and Muslim woman is inspiring for many reasons – one being that she is a self-taught ‘Junior Software Engineer and Blockchain Developer’ that used the pandemic as an opportunity to change career paths and teach herself how to code. The second reason is that she
