Educators From The United States

"Whatever your future holds, I hope you will serve humanity and positively impact the way we live."

"Each of you has your own crew of supporters. You can name those friends and family members right now. Those who believe in you and regularly invest in your well-being. Those who surround you with love and encouragement, giving the best of themselves so that you can be your personal best,"

"And my parents, for the life of them, could not figure out why the phone bill was so high. I finally told my mother, like five years ago, that it was me who did that."

"You are competing with some wicked smart people from all over the world, literally all over the world. So that is like… the floor as you're going in. Just be very, very mindful of your education."

"It feels like there's an elephant sitting on your chest,” she said. “So breathing out is very labored. You have to be very deliberate about exhaling and that lasts for about 45 seconds to a minute. And then after that, you have left earth's atmosphere and you're in space"

"You eat just about any type of food that you want,” Higginbotham said. “So my commander, who was a big shrimp guy, had shrimp cocktail at every single meal — breakfast, lunch and dinner."

"Having diverse perspectives is an important aspect to developing innovative solutions to hard problems. Some of it is because, when you have a group of individuals with different experiences that collaboratively contribute to developing a solution, it gets everyone else in the room to think differently and ask different questions. Studies have shown, time and time again, that when you combine different perspectives from a diverse group of people, the result is having better innovations."

"We are getting closer. In addition to Figure’s advances, Amazon is testing Agility Robotics’ Digit, a two-legged robot, in its U.S. warehouses and Elon Musk’s Tesla is developing a humanoid robot called Optimis. That said, I think we are still a little ways from the tipping point since we don’t yet have a low-cost platform at scale."

"Robots will take away jobs but, on the more positive side, it will also lead to the creation of new jobs. We are not yet at the stage where robotic systems are fully intelligent. They can navigate in different factory environments, but they aren’t able to think adaptively in dynamic situations. Humans will therefore be needed as their work partners."

"I’ve always liked math."

"You have to know it’s your calling because it’s not easy in this area particularly when most of the people around you don’t look like you. You will run into hostility. There will be people who think you should not be there, and I had my share of experiences like that."

"Yes, there weren’t any African American women studying aerospace/mechanical like me. There weren’t any at my university, which was a historically Black college. I could have said that I felt out of sorts but because I played sports most of my life and I played with boys, I didn’t really feel so out of place."

"At the time, the only type of engineer I was aware of was one who drove a train. I was not interested in learning how to drive a train, but very much interested in getting away from home for the summer so that I did not have to wash dishes."

"One could argue whether or not it's a breakthrough, but DeepSeek has really rattled the gen AI environment."

"The first one is a favorite is because when I was young, I got to see man go to the Moon."

"I was used to kind of being the only girl a lot. I probably did better than most in terms of the cultural shock and not having other women around, but I had to deal with some prejudice as people doubted my capabilities. So, there are always challenges and I don’t think it just being about the color of your skin or your gender."

"I graduated with high honors and passed the exams for all of New York's Technical High Schools but instead of attending those schools, I moved to Cambridge, Mass., to live with my grandparents and attended high school at the Cambridge School of Weston."

"That singular experience is why you are able to have this conversation with me today. The level of confidence that she had in making that proclamation that I could be an engineer was enough to carry me through. I went from that horribly failed exam to getting an A in the class."

"There’s an interesting journey to my research. The class that I was struggling with at the undergraduate level was fluid flow. That is one of the core courses in chemical engineering, and I remember leaving it going, “God, thank you and good riddance.”"

"I was resistant to the notion of mentors for a long time, and part of that was probably me being defensive in the sense that people don’t randomly come up to folks like me and nominate us. For a long time, I didn’t get opportunities to interact with mentors in the way you might traditionally describe, but I did have interesting experiences."

"You must have confidence in yourself, and for me my spiritual grounding was very important, knowing that God loves me as much as he loves anybody else and that He’ll fight battles I can’t. I’m not in a room to fight. I just believe in myself, and I believe in Him. Some of the groups I was a part of at MIT never had a woman or an African American before."

"It’s a little bit embarrassing, but real in the sense that there was no deliberate move towards engineering. In fact, growing up in Nigeria, engineering was often a profession reserved for men and women were steered toward careers in healthcare and medicine."

"Many engineers treat speech like it’s any other signal when it is not. As a professor, I had a couple of Ph.D. students who did dissertations in this area, and I had a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard for a year where I could put all of it together into a solution."

"That really got me excited about graduate school and I was attracted to the lab of Dan Hammer, who was interested in understanding how white blood cells — especially neutrophils, which take up pathogens — interact during the body’s inflammation response. I spent my graduate school days trying to understand how to create particles, artificial cells, that could mimic this behavior."

"We’re going to keep innovating and seeing how we can fill a void that’s out there involving speech and sound.” — Carol Espy-Wilson, founder and CTO of OmniSpeech"

"We're going to a place that's super cool and is a juicy, juicy science target"

"Like, how you get there, how you deal with the radiation, how you power a spacecraft so far from the Sun. This talk will give people a peek into some of the interesting things that have happened along the way and hopefully plant a little seed of excitement that they can nurture over the next five years to get ready for all the science data that this mission is planning to send back."

"I became interested in noise problems while attending a workshop at NSF. People from various companies discussed issues with deploying speech technology over VOIP and dealing with everyday noise."

"People just sometimes see what they want. They put their own filters on and choose to like or dislike you based on whatever they think. What I did was just worked really hard and proved them wrong."

"I first realized I had an aptitude for Math and Science during my high school years at Marine Park JHS, where I was the only Black student enrolled in the Special Progress program. In my senior year of JHS, I won second place in the Science Fair and scored in the 90s on all my Regents and citywide exams."

"Because of my training at MIT where we focused on understanding what’s unique about speech and understanding how it is produced. I could use my knowledge to deal with removing noise to help improve voice communications."

"It's in a place that is really hard to study because Jupiter, my favorite planet, has a massive radiation field around it. Europa is orbiting inside that radiation field, so there are some pretty significant technical challenges with even conceiving a mission that can study a moon there."

"The first time I remember being fascinated by space was when I read about how the solar system formed. The fact that it was formed from a giant cloud of gas and dust spewed out by supernovas and it all came together under gravity and made the Sun and all the planets – I thought it was bananas that scientists could figure all that out based on what they can see today. I remember thinking, “That’s really cool that we can know that about space.”"

"The things I do on a day-to-day basis change over the course of the life cycle of a mission. Early on, you’re involved in the requirements and rules the design has to follow so you can meet your mission goals. So you work with people at all the different levels to develop the requirements and make sure all those rules are written properly. Then systems engineers are involved with verifying those requirements and developing tests and sitting in on the tests."

"I share this story to emphasize the critical importance for us to be socially conscious and promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in our solutions."

"My academic career now combines all this to try and understand the expression patterns of these cell surface receptors in cardiovascular disease."

"You know one of the things I can say is that to get a doctorate — I have my doctorate in electrical engineering from MIT– you have to be willing to work hard and also have to be passionate about what you’re doing."

"This support will help us to build a megawatt-sized building block or module that can process two thousand tons of carbon dioxide a year"

"What we’re doing is essentially industrial photosynthesis,” Etosha says. “We’re transforming carbon dioxide in a manner analogous to what plants do, and the result is carbon compounds and oxygen."

"We’re still in early days,” she says. “But we believe carbon transformation to be a critical part of a comprehensive climate strategy."

"What a lot of airlines and large Fortune 500 companies are realizing is that the aviation sector is very hard to decarbonize,” Cave said at the CES tech trade show in January. Solutions such as battery-powered planes and hydrogen will take years to come to scale"

"I admire the leaders who can rise to the need of the moment. Whether it is empathy when their team needs to be listened to, inspiration that motivates large groups to do great things, or patience when things go awry, great leaders can switch into each mode."

"I kind of saw myself as being a scientist in a lab and developing something new and novel helping deploy it as part of a larger company"

"My advisors had backgrounds in computer science, gaming, and cognitive psychology. Through coursework and research, I became interested in how the brain processes information. My research focused on behavioral modeling and mobile learning and I focused my dissertation research on creating intelligent tutoring systems for handheld devices, e.g. Palm Pilots, and early handheld devices.While I enjoyed teaching, I also wanted to learn more in the policy arena that could greatly effect the broader community and I decided to apply for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Policy Fellowship."

"Employees are our number one asset, and their concerns are valid, so I'm taking a very strategic approach to address items from the DEOCS survey perspective"

"I mean, it’s a total different kind of dynamic. So I can truly say that Twitter and TikTok are really where my pocket is. Everyone else is just kind of there."

"Where more are the streets than social media? So I started on Twitter, and the way I ended up other places beyond Twitter, ’cause Twitter really was my pocket because I didn’t really understand social media. I still don’t understand Instagram. No clue how Instagram works."

"If you build it, they will come. But you have to build it in the right place, right? So I had to go where they are, you know."

"I like to call 2020 my Jerry McGuire moment. It’s like the beginning of Jerry McGuire. He talks about, “I want to be a agent but I want to learn to be a sports agent in a new way.”"

"What I realized is that every time I was posting something, I think I had maybe like a thousand followers or maybe 2,000 in 2020, even after seven years on social media, and it just started growing and people loved when I put engineering and robotics quizzes. They’d be like, “I don’t know what any of this is, but put another one.” And I thought it was so crazy."