Maggie Lo ‘23
The EA STEM speaker series has this year highlighted presentations from Rajatesh Gudibande, the Co-Founder and President at GraphWear Technologies, and Dr. Vijay Kumar, the Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering. Danielle Feinberg, cinematographer and Director of Photography for Lighting at Pixar Animation Studios, will be presenting in the Spring.
Photo courtesy of the EA Communications Department
The STEM speaker series is funded by the Clare Foundation, a program that has supported STEM education at EA for about five to six years. Grace Limaye, Science Department Chair, says, “It is the Clare Foundation that, by virtue of the Hinton family directing them, gives us the money. We have to write a proposal every year, specifically saying how we would spend any grant that they might give us.” The Hinton family currently have three children in the Lower school and are interested in STEM initiatives at EA.
Some of the foundation’s grant money has gone to Pennsylvania Junior Academy of Science (PJAS), Robotics, and the EA Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), which according to Limaye, “is essentially a program within the school that provides ongoing professional development and coaching for teachers to be better at teaching.”
She notes, however, that “there has always been this core amount of money that has gone to bringing in STEM speakers and paying them honoraria, which are these little monetary gifts for actually making the effort to come and see us. Some of the speakers that we’ve had were so sought after that they actually have a speaker fee. Sometimes that can be substantial, and sometimes that’s not. It really depends on the speaker.”
Researching potential speakers and proposing them to the Hinton family has evolved differently since the beginning of the STEM speaker series. Limaye explains, “When we first heard that we were going to get a beautiful grant from the Hinton family, we assembled the Math and Science departments together. We had big sheets of poster paper, and we were brainstorming all the cool people we could bring in.”
After they listed a few of the possible speakers that they were interested in, they “had this lovely colleague in the Development Office named Tory Stagnaro who did all the leg work of tracking down these speakers, seeing if they had websites by which she could contact them or if they had agents that we needed to work through. We would coordinate who would escort and guide the speaker around campus and set them up for their presentation, but also help them go and visit classes too. That’s how it started.”
In later years, proposal work has become the role of a smaller committee, with Matthew Memmo, Computer Science Department Chair, heading the initiative. He says, “Every year, we get in touch with the heads of the STEM departments as well as [Academic Dean] Chris Anderson, and we ask those heads to poll their faculty and see if there’s anyone cutting edge who we should be going after to come in. We get suggestions from our departments. Those suggestions are great, but sometimes it’s just not feasible. We have a list of suggestions that’s pretty large. We try to rotate it, so we hit different disciplines each year.” Limaye also explains that “Susan Shafer in the Development Office has been instrumental in writing up the proposals every year.”
The Spring STEM speaker will be Danielle Feinberg, who according to Memmo, “is a computer scientist by trade, but has gotten very involved in other sciences like Physics. She talks a lot about how lights and shadows are played in the Pixar animation. She gives a great Ted Talk about Finding Nemo and the light and physics behind how light shines through the water. She’s very much involved with girls who code.”
Matthew Davis, Upper School Computer Science teacher, is excited for Feinberg because “a lot of our STEM speakers have been very hard science heavy. I think she will speak to a lot of different types of students, then maybe our original STEM speakers have, because someone who makes Pixar movies is going to speak to a very wide audience, and maybe kids that already weren’t predisposed to STEM.”
Members of the community have mixed feelings about the STEM speakers. Limaye asserts the importance of having STEM speakers, saying, “Any exposure we can give to students to what’s happening in the real world about science, engineering, technology, and math is a good thing. We’re so artificial here in the lab. It’s very prescribed. We know what’s going to happen, and students probably can guess what’s going to happen. Science is all about the unknown, and taking a leap. The idea for bringing in speakers is to show students that they can actually make a career out of discovery, investigation, dealing with the unknown, and failure; it can be a really fulfilling career.”
Similarly, Elizabeth Boruff ‘23 comments, “For our STEM speakers, I think it’s really interesting and helpful for us to have them during our activity periods, so we get a chance to learn about things that aren’t necessarily in our curriculum. We had Vjay Kumar, and I thought he did a really great job explaining AI to a lot of the students who don’t have the opportunity to take that class and explaining the future of technology and AI and how that’s going to become an integral part of how we live our lives.”
On the other hand, some members of the community have suggestions for the STEM speaker selections. Rohan Sivakumar ‘24 says, “Personally, I have to say that they’re interesting in certain capacities, but also listening to a presentation that’s lengthy and demands your attention can be difficult. I think it’s important to have speakers, but limiting it to just STEM could be changed. It’s really cool, but not everybody’s a STEM person. If somebody was talking about some research they did about history or something, I feel like that would be more engaging for the people who aren’t as interested in STEM.”