Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month
May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month and was chosen to commemorate the immigration of the first Japanese to the United States in May 1843, and to mark the anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad in May 1869 by Chinese immigrants. Since then Asian Americans have continued to make many contributions to STEM fields, and we at Pink Space Theory want to highlight some of these innovators for inspiring us.
Taiwanese American Steven Chen, along with Bangladeshi-American Jawed Karim and Chad Hurley founded YouTube. What started out as a way of watching and sharing funny cat videos grew into a much broader platform that captures the attention of billions of people every day. He studied computer science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before working at PayPal and sold YouTube to Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion.
Throughout her 30-year career, Filipino American physician and pediatric immunologist Katherine Luzuriaga, M.D., developed one of the early diagnostic tests for HIV in children and also conducted clinical research into antiretroviral therapies (ART) labelled for use in children. In 2014, she was credited with being behind the first well-documented case of an HIV-infected child being functionally cured of the infection.
Although Indian American computer architect Ajay Bhatt had a hand in developing a range of computer-related technologies, the one he’s best known for is the Universal Serial Bus—better known as the USB. After emerging on the tech scene in the late 1990s, the USB became one of the most popular ways of transferring data from one device to another.
Colonel Ellison Onizuka was a distinguished U.S. Air Force pilot before becoming part of NASA's Astronaut Class of 1978, also known as the Thirty-Five New Guys, the first class in nearly a decade and also the first to include women, Hispanics and Asian and African Americans. He became the first Asian American astronaut in space when he completed a mission on Space Shuttle Discovery in 1985. His life was cut short in 1986 as part of the team aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger.
Reshma Saujani is an American lawyer and founder of the nonprofit organization Girls Who Code, which aims to increase the number of women in computer science and close the gender employment gap . Girls Who Code runs programs during the academic year teaching high school girls computing skills and trips to companies like Twitter and Facebook. There are now over 1500 Girls Who Code clubs across America and as of February 2021, more than 80,000 college-aged alums entering the workforce. Check out her book “Girls Who Code: Learn to Code and Change the World” and virtual classes.
Thank you to all of the Asian American volunteers and partners who support Pink Space Theory and continue sharing their unique contributions to advance STEM!