Celebrating AAPI Heritage Month: These Three Women are Changing the Face of Tech

AAPI Heritage Month is in full swing! This month, and every month tbh, Girls Who Code is celebrating the history, culture, and heritage of diverse voices in tech. Let’s shine a light on the incredible Asian American and Pacific Islander leaders who are making waves in STEM. Here are just a few you should know!

Tech founder Grace Choi had a passion for both makeup and beauty. This inspired her to invent the world’s first 3D makeup printer. Grace created Mink Beauty, a makeup printer that can turn any image into a wearable shade of cosmetics. She’s also the technologist behind some of our favorite TikTok filters. She works with TikTok as a TikTok Effect House Ambassador, creating filters for brands like Fenty Beauty, Dior, and Kosas.

This 18-year-old is using AI to combat cyberbullying. Gitanjali Rao developed Kindly, a software that scans, finds, and flags language for bullying in social media posts. At age 12, inspired by the Flint water crisis, Gitanjali invented a mobile device to test water for lead. This led to her being named Time’s first-ever Kid Of the Year in 2020.

Computer scientist and Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li has been dubbed the “godmother of AI” for her pioneering research in this field. She’s most notably known for creating ImageNet, the dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision in the 2010s.

She went on to co-found AI4ALL, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting diversity and inclusion in the field of artificial intelligence. In 2023, Li was named one of the Time100 AI Most Influential People and was appointed to the United Nations Scientific Advisory Board.

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