Celebrating Ndi-Igbo

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...

Dr. Unoma Okorafor is founder and CEO of Working to Advance STEM Education for African Women (WAAW) Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is to promote STEM Education for African women, and to ensure that talent is engaged in technology innovation in Africa. WAAW Foundation especially focuses on girls in poverty-affected areas with a goal to ultimately increase the pipeline of African girls entering STEM related careers. Unoma earned her undergraduate degree in Computer and Electrical Engineering from the University of Lagos and a M.Sc. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University, Okorafor also graduated from INSEAD’s Social Entrepreneurship program and Stanford University Business School’s Executive Program in Social Entrepreneurship. She then went on to get her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University and gained experience as a Software Developer and Engineer at Texas Instruments, IBM and Hewlett-Packard prior to her organi...