Interested in becoming a mentor? Email us at BrainCake@carnegiesciencecenter.org about helping curious, innovative girls fall in love with science, math, and technology! We can’t wait to talk with you!
Meet the Season Two Mentors!
Mia Davis
Making makeup safe for women across the world
Mia runs the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, a national organization dedicated to advocating for stricter safety standards for makeup. She rallies the Campaign’s 50,000 members with information about the hazardous chemicals in many personal care products and invites them contact these companies asking for change. She also works with organizations across the country pushing for legislation that would ban toxic chemicals in consumer products.
In her current work, Mia is passionate about taking toxic chemicals out of consumer products to reduce the incidence of serious health issues, including breast cancer. She hopes that the world be will a safer, less toxic place because of her efforts.
Erin Estell
Working to save our feathered friends
Erin is the Manager of Community Outreach and Education at the National Aviary, an indoor bird zoo that’s home to more than 600 birds representing more than 200 species from around the world. Erin started out at the Aviary working as a bird trainer with many species – from eagles and parrots to penguins and pigeons.
Her passion for birds and wildlife conservation began when she volunteered at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in Columbus, Ohio as a teenager. In high school she also volunteered at the Ohio Division of Wildlife and worked part-time at a veterinary clinic to gain as much experience with animals as possible.
She worked as a bird trainer for five years before switching to the Marketing Department, where she currently acts as the organization’s spokesperson and is the Project Manager for the Aviary’s Master Plan and expansion project.
Nina Kang
Coding a Map-able world
Nina is a senior software engineer for Google Maps, where she writes computer code in the C++ and Python coding languages. In addition to creating clean and streamlined code, Nina helps her coworkers review code, troubleshoots problems, and monitors the computers to make sure they’re not overworked (when smoke comes out of them because she’s working so hard, that’s a big giveaway).
Nina describes one of the main challenges of her job as keeping track of how everything works, and not accidentally breaking things. She describes the systems at Google as a “garden pumped full of fertilizer,” and notes that neglecting the key tasks of pruning and weeding lets everything get tangled. On the bright side, she adds, pruning is fun.. She encourages teenage girls to push themselves to be their best, and to try to do at least one scary thing every day – whether it's homework or reading or shopping or chores, try to do it just a little bit differently from everyone else while still trying to do as good a job as you can.
Tanya Martinez
Helping companies go green
Tanya is a renewable energy entrepreneur for 7thgen Energy, a consulting firm that helps clients develop clean energy solutions. Outside of work, she loves to dance and stay in shape, and has even started to participate in fitness competitions that require a choreographed routine including dance, strength, and flexibility. Tanya encourages girls to first find out what your passions are, then figure out how you can use your technical skills to match them.
Vera Donnenberg
Exploring stem cells as a way to fight cancer
Vera is a stem cell researcher at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Hillman Cancer Center who is investigating a new hypothesis that cancer originates from damaged tissue stem cells, the rare cells that maintain and repair tissues throughout adult life. She was born in Prague, the capital of the modern Czech Republic. She left the restrictive Yugoslavian regime when she was in university, breaking away from a college ski trip and escaping on foot through the foothills of the Alps into Italy. After working for the United Nations in Rome, she immigrated to the United States, eventually earning her master’s degree in clinical pharmacology at Johns Hopkins University and becoming a U.S. citizen.
Vera has always been interested in nature and science, mostly from the perspective of a painter and a farmer. As a child, she helped her grandmother with her 20 acre orchard and about 20 chickens, which gave her a chance to gather data, observe kinetic changes, and document events in the plant and animal kingdoms.
Tonya Groover
Fixing the leaky pipeline of girls in computer science
Tonya is the Founding Coordinator of the Technology Leadership Initiative (TLI) at the University of Pittsburgh. TLI is a pre-college program for high school students interested in the computer sciences. She founded the program after conducting research about a “leaking pipeline” that distracted students of color from entering technical fields. The study concluded with a proposal for a pre-college program in the Department of Computer Science to help recruit and encourage historically underrepresented groups to pursue degrees in computing. TLI recently completed its third year of operation.
Tonya became interested in math and computer science in high school, when she took her first programming class. She’s excited to be able to mentor and educate the next generation of mathematicians and computer scientists.
Andrea Arkin
Coordinating medical supplies for developing countries
Andrea is a program officer for Global Links, a humanitarian organization that sends unused medical supplies, surplus equipment and furnishings from the U.S. healthcare system to hospitals and clinics that serve the poorest segments of the population in developing countries. She coordinates with partners in Latin America and the Caribbean region to determine their hospital needs and designs the best donation of medical materials to help meet those needs. She urges teen girls to get involved – find something that you enjoy and do it, whether it’s sports, school clubs, or something else. She notes that by providing medical aid to hospitals, she’s helping those organizations improve the quality of life in their communities.
Judy Lee
Finding creative solutions to everyday challenges
Judy works at IDEO as a mechanical engineer, designing toys, pet products, and packaging for over-the-counter drugs and food. Every day, she and her colleagues brainstorm ideas to create something new, and then develop prototypes for those new products. She loves the creative and nurturing environment of IDEO, a design consulting firm, and values the high level of collaboration and communication there.
Judy decided in high school that she wanted to go into engineering; the only problem was that she wasn’t exactly sure what engineering meant. It took her a while to decide which aspect of engineering was right for her, and urges girls today to relax – it’s okay if you don’t pick the right discipline the first time because you can always change to something else. Your time is never wasted because every experience is a chance to learn and grow.
Meet the Season One Mentors!
Dr. Bernardine Dias
A woman from Sri Lanka makes real change happen with technology
Bernardine is a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). She is interested in finding innovative ways to use advanced technology for helping people in developing countries around the world. She launched the TechBridgeWorld initiative at CMU, and is currently working towards launching its first program: the Technology Peace Corps. Bernardine also started CMU’s Women@SCS, an organization that provides networking, mentoring, and support opportunities for women studying computer science.
Bernardine also works on coordinating the actions of multiple robots in changing environments. She’s interested in enabling more effective interactions between humans and robots. Finally, she researches robotics as it relates to space exploration! She has participated in projects that mapped out Mars, searched for extraterrestrial life, and programmed the motion for exploration rover vehicles.
Dr. Tanya Hagen
Just your ‘average’ training camp Doc for the Steelers
Tanya is the sports medicine fellowship director at UPMC’s Center for Sports Medicine. She’s an orthopedist, and is one of the few female sports medicine physicians in Pittsburgh. Tanya also teaches orthopedic surgery at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine.
Tanya cares for athletes on all levels – from recreational to high school, college, and professional. She is a team physician for the University of Pittsburgh, Robert Morris University, Point Park University, and the Pittsburgh Passion, a women’s professional football team. She also is part of the medical team that treats Pittsburgh’s own Black and Gold, the Steelers!
Tanya is a member of the American Medical Association, the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine. She values public service, and has performed volunteer work with the Special Olympics, the Banso Baptist Hospital in Cameroon, Africa, a health promotion and cancer outreach program in Washington, D.C., and a homeless health clinic in California. Her dedication to helping others, regardless of resources, is an inspiration!
Jill Johnson
From a little girl at the beach to the Smithsonian’s Ocean Hall
Jill develops exhibits for the Ocean Hall at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where she has worked for nearly 30 years. Starting out as an intern, she’s now risen to the challenge of assisting the curator. The task? Build a living model coral reef ecosystem for the public to see! She spent a number of years conducting field work aboard a Smithsonian research vessel, collecting specimens for the museum’s many exhibits.
Jill worked as the facility manager for the museum’s Marine Ecosystem exhibit from 1986 to 1991. She then became an exhibit director for the Office of Exhibits, working on a number of permanent and temporary exhibitions including, “In Search of Giant Squid,” “The Mighty Marlin,” “America's Wildest Places,” and the renovation of the Museum's rotunda with its world-renowned African elephant. Now, she’s working on the massive renovation of the museum’s Ocean Hall, the museum’s largest exhibit to date that will open to the public in September 2008.
Ariadna Font Llitjós
Preserving dying languages with Artificial Intelligence
Ariadna is a doctoral candidate at the Language Technologies Institute in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. She is especially interested in Machine Translation, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Human Computer Interaction, especially via the Internet. Her current research focuses on developing Automatic Machine Translation Systems for resource-poor languages such as Mapudungun in Chile and Argentina, and Quechua, the language of the ancient Inca Empire.
Ari speaks eight languages herself! She studied Translation and Interpreting at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. She then worked on projects all over Europe, and in 1999 was awarded a scholarship to pursue graduate studies in the United States.
Ari worked on a Spanish Generation Grammar for the Microsoft Research Machine Translation system, and was awarded a Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship and an SCS Graduate Student Citizenship Award. She has been actively involved in promoting and mentoring women in computing and technology through the Women@SCS organization since 2001.
Jonna Mendez
What do I do? Shhhh. It’s a secret.
Jonna Mendez is a retired CIA intelligence officer who has lived under cover all over the world. She specialized in clandestine photography, disguise and identity transformation. In the 1970s, she was responsible for training some of the CIA’s most important foreign agents to use spy cameras and process the intelligence gathered from them.
Jonna was valued greatly by the CIA’s Office of Technical Service, who selected her for exclusive and prestigious trainings. She took on very difficult assignments across the globe, matching wits with forces from the KGB in the Soviet Union, the Stasi in East Germany, and the DGI in Cuba. In 1991, she was promoted to Chief of Disguise Division and ran a multi-million dollar program with staff positioned all over the world. Jonna retired from government work in 1993, earning the CIA’s Intelligence Commendation Medal.
Jonna is a highly-sought consultant in the U.S. Intelligence community, and she lectures to a wide range of audiences. She has also participated in two documentaries on the Discovery Channel. She keeps busy with her creative photography, which she exhibits in restaurants and galleries nationwide. It’s no secret: we think Jonna is very cool!
Mary Louise Wotring
Studying Pittsburgh's rivers to unlock environmental mysteries
Mary Louise is an engineer who began her science career in college, where she received both an ROTC scholarship in technology and a Women in Engineering scholarship. After graduating, she served in the United States Navy working on technical and targeting systems. She has worked with the 4H clubs and the Girl Scouts, and has taught environmental science. She started working as an educator at RiverQuest, an adventure-based river learning center that uses Pittsburgh's rivers as an experiential classroom to get kids excited about science, mathematics and learning. She now serves as the organization’s Director of Administration.
Erin Copeland
Using science to restore Pittsburgh’s natural areas
Erin is a restoration ecologist who works with the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy (PPC). She works with volunteers and City of Pittsburgh to assess, restore, and manage the parks’ natural areas, and is also building partnerships with local universities. She wants scientists to use the parks as backyard laboratories, which in turn can provide the PPC with data to guide future restoration efforts.
Erin is an expert in riparian forest ecology, which means she studies the interface between land and a flowing surface water body, such as a river. She has worked with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, the Student Conservation Association in Bear Mountain State Park, and an AmeriCorps Restoration Team in the New York City park system. Most recently she was a research assistant on an EPA watershed grant. Erin also performs volunteer work, and recently returned from a two-month trip to Peru where she taught children who were unable to afford school, conducted research in the Amazon, and traveled.