Keynote Sessions

Speaker Bio

I Am From
(Inspired by Where I’m From by George Ella Lyon)

I am from Chicago, born into U.S. citizenship because my birth mother came to America as an unwed student carrying me in her belly.
I am from Vermont where I joined my adopted parents who were Nisei, a tiny part of an entire generation forever traumatized by their concentration camps.
I am from Partridge, Kansas, where I started school where no one looked like me and where my father was the only minister of the only church in a town too small to have paved roads.
I am from Maui where, in the sixth grade, nearly every kid looked like me but hardly anyone could spell like me.
I am from public high school and Boy Scouts adventures and basketball games played in slippers on hot asphalt and summers working in the pineapple cannery, now shuttered.
I am from an undergraduate science curriculum that emphasized knowing instead of thinking, and getting “the right answer” instead of discovery.
I am from Students For Equity where, in my senior year in college, I learned that an injustice to one is injustice to all.
I am from serving students and faculty as a professor and department head at a large public research university and a small liberal arts college.
I am from a private philanthropy whose science education programs encouraged colleges and universities to create a culture of equity and inclusion to ensure that all students, regardless of where they come from and where they are going, feel that they belong and can be successful. 
I am from a legacy of resistance, awakened again.

Kamau Bobb is the Director of STEM Education Strategy and Research at Google and the founding Senior Director of the Constellations Center for Equity in Computing at Georgia Tech. He is an engineer and science and technology policy scholar whose work focuses on the STEM enterprise, large educational systems, and the structural conditions that influence contemporary American life. He has served as a Program Officer at the National Science Foundation, as a member of President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper STEM + Entrepreneurship Taskforce to help U.S. cities craft strategies to engage young men and boys of color in the STEM landscape. Dr. Bobb holds a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Policy from Georgia Tech and M.S. and B.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.