PROVIDENCE – Forbes magazine named three Brown University alumnae to its America’s Top 50 Women in Tech 2018 list: Ayanna Howard, Mary Lou Jepsen and danah boyd, who legally changed the spelling of her name to all lowercase letters.
A 1993 Brown graduate, Howard is a roboticist and educator who currently works at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she is the chair of the university’s School of Interactive Computing and director of the Human-Automation Systems Lab. She is also a co-founder of Georgia Tech VentureLab company Zyrobotics.
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Howard’s research, according to Forbes, involves work to address tech-product gender biases in everyday products, such as small apps on smartphones and artificial-intelligence algorithms that fuel organizations and industries.
Jepsen earned her undergraduate degree from Brown in 1987, a master’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989 and her doctorate from Brown in 1996. Her work as an innovator and inventor focuses on consumer hardware, display technology, electrical engineering and health care.
According to Forbes, Jepsen has led technology teams at Google, Facebook, Oculus and Intel, ushering in adoption of technologies such as HDTV. She is also the founder of Openwater, developing a portable device with infrared-light capability and holographic technology that provides more imaging like an MRI. Jepsen is also a CNN Top 10 Thinker and was named to the Time 100 list by Time magazine in 2008.
Working as a technologist and social entrepreneur, boyd looks at relationships between technology and society, Forbes said. She is a principal researcher at Microsoft, visiting professor at New York University, the founder and president of Data & Society, and a research affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Graduating from Brown in 2000 with a degree in computer science, boyd went on to earn a master’s degree at MIT and a doctorate in information sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. She was also named to Forbes’ The World’s Top 50 Women in Tech 2018 list.
Susan Shalhoub is a PBN contributing writer.
