Black History Month

Earlier this year Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, an American actress and singer, became the first transgender actor to win a Golden Globe for her performance on FX’s Pose. The series wrapped its third and final season in June 2021, and is set in New York in the 1980s and follows the lives of queer people of color, especially Black trans women, who are involved in the ballroom scene. Rodriguez, who herself became involved in ballroom at the age of 14, starred as Blanca, a young woman who forms her own house and serves as a surrogate mother to several young queer people of color. In a 2018 interview with NPR, Rodriguez drew similarities between Blanca’s experience as a Black trans woman and her own, saying, “I've had a lot of things that have happened to me, but I look past those things now and now I'm moving forward and I always believe that the experiences that you go through are what make you stronger and what help you push forward through life.”

Sara Menker is the founder and CEO of Gro Intelligence, a big-data startup that uses artificial intelligence to analyze global agricultural data and generate actionable insights into food insecurity and climate change. Earlier in her career, while working at Morgan Stanley, Menker became interested in farmland investments and, concerned by the threat of a global food crisis, began to investigate how data could be used to prevent food shortages. tThis passion led Menker to start Gro Intelligence in 2014, and since then the company has worked with thousands of clients, ranging from large food corporations to financial institutions to governments, helping them plan adequately for changes in the food markets. TIME Magazine named Menker as one of the year’s 100 most influential people in 2021.

Dr. Joy Buolamwini is a Ghanaian-American computer scientist, researcher and digital activist who studies the way that algorithms contribute to and reinforce existing social biases, especially when it comes to race and gender. As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Buolamwini uncovered gender and skin-type biases within commercial facial recognition technologies and this discovery that propelled her to found the Algorithmic Justice League, a digital advocacy organization pushing for more accountability in the tech sector. In 2016, Dr. Buolamwini gave a TED Talk on algorithmic discrimination which has been watched over 1 million times. Her research has been covered in over 40 countries and she has spoken out on the need for algorithmic justice at the World Economic Forum and the United Nations.