MAKERS spotlights five women at the exhilarating forefront of technologies remaking our world, from AI to robotics to telepathy to deep space exploration. They are engineers and computer scientists at the top of their game in an industry where women make up only a quarter of technical jobs. They are exploding silicon ceilings and motivating a new generation of female “makers” to join their ranks and make an impact.
Ayanna Howard, Roboticist
Dr. Ayanna Howard has had a big impact on robotics. She’s one of the few black women in the field and she’s working on inventions with an eye on social impact, not science fiction.
[youtube https://youtu.be/uVJeI60glTE]
Mary Lou Jepsen, Inventor, Entrepreneur
If anyone can make a Vulcan mind meld come true, it’s tech inventor Mary Lou Jepsen. With every new invention, she’s moving humanity closer to unlocking the mind for both health and communications purposes.
[youtube https://youtu.be/t4okOT5aUFk]
Diana Trujillo, Aerospace Engineer
Men can have the moon. As an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Diana Trujillo is taking us to Mars. Trujillo’s work on the NASA Mars Curiosity Rover mission has given us our first close-up glimpses of Mars and clear evidence that the Red Planet was once capable of supporting life.
[youtube https://youtu.be/4yGgsx57LBM]
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Join 10k+ tech and VC leaders for growth and connections at Disrupt 2025
Netflix, Box, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, Vinod Khosla — just some of the 250+ heavy hitters leading 200+ sessions designed to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss a chance to learn from the top voices in tech. Grab your ticket before doors open to save up to $444.
Fei-Fei Li, Professor at Stanford University & Chief Technologist at Google Cloud
Fei-Fei Li came to the U.S. from China at 16 with a love for science and she never looked back. Educated at Princeton and Caltech, her early work in robotics revolutionized machine learning and AI. Her focus on inclusion in tech careers and diversity in what we teach machines suggests that tomorrow’s robots won’t be sexist.
[youtube https://youtu.be/UvauKbNiX7k]
Limor Fried, Founder & CEO, Adafruit Industries
Electronics. Companies. Movements. Limor Fried can build anything. In fact, the MIT graduate loves sharing her ideas and the tools for creating them so much she created Adafruit Industries, a top-20 U.S. manufacturing firm and a global online community that follows her every machine-making move.
[youtube https://youtu.be/V4WtPv0yWek]
For more info, check out https://www.makers.com/techmakers.
