As an aspiring social technology entrepreneur, Erica is involved in activities such as student government and building nanosatellites at her high school. Through her exploration of technology, she found her other passion: to eliminate the gender inequality in the STEM world by founding Bytes of Code to provide STEM workshops such as HTML, CSS, circuitry, and Arduino to her local community. Realizing that there are many communities who are also not able to offer STEM opportunities to girls, Erica created a multilingual online curriculum and established over 20+ global ambassadors across the United States and in Mexico, Liberia, India, and Saudi Arabia to carry out similar workshops, impacting over 75,000 girls.
Through her efforts, Erica has been honored as a Coca-Cola Scholar and Three Dot Dash Global Teen Alternate Leader. In college, she hopes to pursue computer science while also minoring in entrepreneurship and plans to use her education to solve complex social problems through technological innovation.
Erica was nominated for this prestigious award by Chapter 12330 Adviser Cathleen Zeleski. Leslie Roach is Principal at Northwood High School in the Irvine Unified School District.
