Abigail (California)
Abigail is the founder of a student-led nonprofit dedicated to unifying youth through early exposure to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM. She was honored with the SWENext Community Award in 2024 and the National Center for Women & Information Technology, or NCWIT, National Honorable Mention in 2025. Her research spans AI-driven cancer detection, drug resistance in pathogens, and enzymatic catalysis. She has also contributed to the development of assistive technologies, such as smart walkers for the elderly, blending her passion for biomedical research, data science, and engineering to create meaningful impact.
Anarghya (Washington)
Anarghya is an aspiring robotics and AI engineer with six years of competitive robotics experience. She has served as treasurer and outreach lead for her FIRST Robotics team and as team lead, outreach lead, build lead, and lead computer-aided design, or CAD, designer for her FIRST Tech team. Passionate about STEM outreach, she has mentored FIRST LEGO League teams, led workshops, and organized fundraisers to support STEM education while actively promoting gender diversity in engineering through SWENext and other initiatives. Her leadership and impact have earned her recognition as an FIRST Tech Challenge, or FTC, Dean’s List Finalist, NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Affiliate Winner, SWENext Community Award recipient, and a finalist in the Washington State Congressional App Challenge. She has also received FTC Inspire Awards, an FLL Mentor Award, and an FTC invitational qualification to the FIRST Tech World Competition in the Netherlands. She is dedicated to advancing robotics and AI while fostering an inclusive STEM community to create meaningful change.
Anika (California)
Anika is passionate about leveraging STEM to solve global challenges. Her award-winning innovations include a microbial fuel cell that generates sustainable electricity, selected as a Society of Science Top 300 Broadcom MASTERS competitor; a health tracker for asthma management, which won first place at the California State Science Fair in 2021 and has a patent pending; and an AI model for detecting cancer, which was an Alameda County Science Fair winner in 2023. Her mobile app to identify allergens in food and cosmetics earned a “Judge’s Favorite” award at Coolest Projects International in 2024, a global Raspberry Pi Foundation event. This inspired her to start a nonprofit to combat food insecurity. Anika has been a SWENext and SWE High School Leadership Academy member since 2022, HOBY Leadership Ambassador in 2024, and Girls Who Code alumna. She founded her school’s STEAM Forward Club, partnering with the SWENext Club to bridge art and STEM. She earned Gold Presidential Volunteer Service Awards twice as a volunteer, mentor, and researcher at the Chabot Space & Science Center California, starting in 2022. Her NASA internship in 2024 fueled her aerospace ambitions, complementing her computer science expertise.
Claire (North Carolina)
As a member of her SWENext Club, which doubles as an all-girl FIRST Robotics Competition team, 9008 G-Force Robotics, Claire empowers girls in STEM. As CAD lead and a member of the build team, she enjoys robot design and fabrication. Additionally, leading G-Force’s “Be That Engineer” Literacy Project, Claire invites women STEM professionals to write encouraging notes in books from the SWENext booklist that are read and donated to elementary schools. Collaborating with global organizations, Claire has grown the project in nine states and five other countries. Recently, she researched and found books in Arabic and Swedish, and coordinated a donation to a Kenyan afterschool program. Claire is also a member of the Student Association for STEM Advocacy, advocating for extracurricular STEM funding on Capitol Hill. She earned the 2024 SWENext STEM in Action and the 2024 FIRST Dean’s List Finalist awards. In the future, Claire wants to pursue aerospace engineering.
Saanvi (Washington)
Saanvi has served as president of her school’s SWENext club for two years. Building the SWENext Club for her school from scratch, she has guided her team to win various challenges such as the Microsoft Hunt the Wumpus and the University of Washington Hack for Social Good competitions. Most notably, her club won the 2025 NASA TechRise challenge and is working with NASA engineers to build a payload for a Stratollite unmanned balloon launch. Outside of SWENext, Saanvi is the team captain of her school’s science olympiad and is a state champion in its detector building and robot tour events. She is passionate about scientific research, interning at the University of Washington Sensor Systems Laboratory, winning Best Interdisciplinary Research and Excellence in Technology awards for building an energy harvester as a renewable energy generator. She also interned at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute, building machine learning models to analyze and predict medulloblastoma tumorigenesis.
Sloan (North Carolina)
Sloan is co-founder of her SWENext Club, which doubles as an all-girl FIRST Robotics Competition team, 9008 G-Force Robotics, for which she served as president. Participating in competitive robotics for seven years, Sloan started two all-girl teams in her hometown to encourage girls to develop their engineering and coding skills while advancing her own abilities. As vice president of her school’s Robotics, Engineering, and Computer Science Club and a member of the Student Association for STEM Advocacy, she is a strong voice on Capitol Hill, advocating for increased federal funding for STEM enrichment programs. Her exemplary efforts and passion for engineering earned her the 2023 and 2025 SWENext STEM in Action awards and the 2024 NCWIT Regional Computing Aspirations Award. Her robotics team was the first all-girl team to win the FIRST World Championship Engineering Inspiration Award in 2024. The team had previously won the World Championship Rookie All-Star Award in 2023.
