Women in STEM - Ayanna Howard
We kick off National Engineers Week highlighting Ayanna MacCalla Howard. She is a roboticist, entrepreneur, and educator that is also a pioneer in the field of therapeutic robotics for children with special needs.
From a very early age, Ayanna was interested in robots, and after graduating with her B.A. in Engineering and her PhD. in Electrical Engineering, she worked on projects for Microsoft and eventually NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In that work, Ayanna was an integral part of developing the intelligence for Mars Rover robots. The application she developed in her time with NASA allowed robots to research the terrain of Mars and determine the best landing place for the human mission when it arrived.
Ayanna has been an author and researcher on over 250 cited works, and holds 4 patents. She is also a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Most recently, Ayanna has been named Dean of the College of Engineering at Ohio State University, making her the first woman to hold that title in the college’s history.
For more information on Ayanna and her incredible career...
And watch this interview with her from the Makers YouTube channel:
