In her lofty career as an aerospace engineer and instrument manager at NASA’s prestigious Goddard Space Flight Center, Aprille Joy Ericsson has played a key role in designing spacecraft and instruments that contribute to our greater understanding of the Sun-Earth connection, space science and Earth itself.  Aprille, who currently serves as the Goddard Space Flight Center’s Program Manager for Small Business Innovative Research and Small Business Technology Transfer Research, is equally known today for her work to motivate other minority students in science and engineering. The majority of her engineering career has been spent working at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center where she began as an aerospace engineer in the Robotics group, but soon after, she transferred into the area of Guidance Navigation & Control. There, she worked on key satellite design projects which were invaluable in predetermining the dynamics and structural reactions of these spacecraft. She would go on to spearhead, or play an important role in, other multi-million dollar space initiatives such as NASA’s Tropical Rain Measuring Mission which helped observe the effects of weather cycles known as El Niño and La Niña in order to correlate their activity with crop productivity. For her work and achievements, she has received numerous honors, including: Howard University’s College of Engineering, Architecture, & Computer Science Alumni Excellence Award; NASA’s Exceptional Achievement in Outreach Award, and the President’s Medal from York College.

Reshma Saujani is the founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, the national non-profit organization working to close the gender gap in technology and change the image of what a programmer looks like and does. The organization has already reached 90,000 girls in all 50 states. She is the author of three books, including the newly released Brave, Not Perfect, Women Who Don't Wait In Line and the New York Times Bestseller Girls Who Code: Learn to Code and Change the World. Reshma’s TED talk, “Teach girls, bravery not perfection,” has more than four million views and has sparked a national conversation about how we’re raising our girls.

In 2010, Reshma surged onto the political scene as the first Indian American woman to run for U.S. Congress. She has also served as Deputy Public Advocate for New York City and ran a spirited campaign for Public Advocate in 2013. Reshma lives in New York City with her husband, Nihal, their son, Shaan, and their bulldog, Stanley.