Bio

Nardos Demilew is an 12th-grade student at Lake Braddock Secondary School. She has also been a member of the STEM Impressionists Program (SIP), a nonprofit organization that supports underrepresented minorities in STEM, for 4 years.

Nardos created her first lesson plan in order to teach at George Mason University’s Females Of Color Underrepresented in STEM (FOCUS) camp; building on what she learned, she became part of the team that presented at the 2018 Jefferson Overseas Schools Technology Institute (JOSTI) conference. Her lesson focused on showing educators how they could teach their students how to make a do-it-yourself (DIY) Spectrometer.

In 2019, Ms. Demilew’s team competed in the Technovation Innovation Challenge to create an app that solves a real-world problem. She utilized her programming skills to code with MIT App Inventor, built a business plan and successfully pitched the app, Know Debt, to increase financial literacy. Nardos was also part of the team that designed and delivered a computing curriculum for minority middle school girls at the Building student Retention through Individuated Guided coHort Training in Computer Science (BRIGHT-CS) camp. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Ms. Demilew, who is a Virginia Affiliate winner for Aspirations in Computing (AiC), worked with her peers to win a $3,000 grant from the National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT) to host HackSIP, a beginners’ hackathon for middle and high school students.

With leadership activities like her role as a 2020 Technica Hackathon ambassador, Ms. Demilew hopes to continue inspiring and supporting Brown girls in their pursuit of STEM.