Celebrating Ndi-Igbo

Dr. Wendy A. Okolo is an aerospace engineering researcher in the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA Ames Research Center. Her focus is in the area of systems health monitoring and control systems design with applications to air and space components, vehicles, and systems. To that effect she is a Sub-Project Manager for the System Wide Safety Project, leading a team to develop the technologies that will enable the safe and seamless integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the U.S. national airspace. She also leads a controls team on a Space Technology project, Pterodactyl, to advance the guidance, navigation, and control capabilities that will make precision landing for deployable entry vehicles a reality for planetary exploration. She received her B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2010 and 2015 respectively. During her undergraduate studies, she interned for two summers with Lockheed Martin working on NASA’...

Rosalyn "Ros" Gold-Onwude is a basketball analyst/broadcaster who calls games for NBA on TNT, Pac-12 Network, NBA TV, and the WNBA's New York Liberty on MSG. Nicknamed Ros, she was previously a reporter for the Golden State Warriors and the San Francisco 49ers. Gold-Onwude is a Stanford University graduate with a BA in communications and a master's degree in sociology. Source: Wikipedia, okayafrica dot com Photo: Twitter

Over the course of a dazzling 25 year-career, Dr. Nneka Abulokwe has delivered all kinds of innovative high-profile digital tech initiatives. She’s worked for some of the largest multinational digital transformation organisations in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and America, becoming an Executive Director of a €3.7 billion organization. She now advises boards on digital, tech and governance as strategic enablers. She is the Chair of the Board Nominations Committee for the Information Systems Audit Control Association (ISACA). The first black woman to sit on the Board of a top European digital transformation organisation. Dr. Abulokwe earned her doctorate at Cranfield School of Management, UK. She has received several professional awards and prestigious fellowships – ranked 9th in the EMpower Financial Times BAME Executive & Role Models 2018; Fellow, The Association for Project Management (FAPM) and Fellow, The British Computer Society (FBCS). She is a Freeman of the Tech...

Jenn Nkiru is an award winning visionary artist and film director based in Peckham, London. Named as one of the 200 women redefining the creative industries in 2018 by The Dots, Her first film EN VOGUE shot by Bradford Young & Arthur Jafa screened internationally to critical success. Previous credits include a documentary series for Redbull and a campaign for photographer Rankin where he selected Nkiru as one of 20 of the “industry’s top directors and most creative talent”.  2018 was a whirlwind year for Jenn. She directed music videos for Neneh Cherry and jazz musician Kamasi Washington; in June, the video for Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Apeshit (under their duo, The Carters) was released, which she worked on alongside director Ricky Saiz. Prior to that, Nkiru debuted the arresting short Rebirth is Necessary – a powerful exploration of the black experience which encompassed archive footage of Sun Ra and the Black Panthers – on NOWNESS. The expressionistic documentary is a for...

Ifeoma is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Before that she was a Research Scientist at the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors (CUBS) and the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR). She completed her PhD in 2009 the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University at Buffalo, SUNY (UB)  as an NSF IGERT Fellow and was an NSF-sponsored Computing Innovation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Computer Science department at the University of Rochester; her master's degree in Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania and her Electrical Engineering undergraduate degree at the University of Lagos, Nigeria. Recently Ifeoma earned a prestigious National Science Foundation award to use computers to better understand human behavior and social interaction. She aims to study human behavior in a new way, by using machine learning techniques to analyze and find patterns i...

Amarachi Nwosu is a self-taught photographer, filmmaker, writer and speaker based in Tokyo, Japan. She is also the founder of  Melanin Unscripted , a platform aimed to dismantle stereotypes and blur the racial lines by exposing complex identities and cultures around the world. Under her platform she has produced and directed films like “Black In Tokyo”, a groundbreaking short documentary that exposed the black experience of living in Tokyo, Japan and curated events in Lagos, Nigeria and New York at spaces like the ICP Museum under the International Center of Photography. With a background in International Communications; she has worked with a number of brands and companies in cities like Lagos, Tokyo, New York and London. As a writer and visual artist, Amarachi is dedicated to telling unique stories that bring identity and culture to light. Her work has been featured on platforms like Huffington Post, CNN Africa, Black Enterprise, The Fader and Highsnobiety. She has also p...