Pooja Chandrashekar

Originally from Northern Virginia, Pooja is currently a freshman at Harvard University concentrating in biomedical engineering with a secondary in global health and health policy. An advocate and speaker for encouraging girls in STEM and computer science, she is the founder of ProjectCSGIRLS, a national youth-driven nonprofit working to close the tech gender gap by running a national computer science competition for middle school girls and hosting workshops around the country.

Pooja has spoken about the underrepresentation of women in technology and her outreach work at conferences and summits around the country including the IEEE Women in Engineering International Leadership Conference, the O’Reilly Velocity New York Conference, and the STEM Symposium for the National Capital Area. She has been recognized by organizations including the National Center for Women in Information Technology and the Clinton Foundation, and her work and writing have appeared in the Huffington Post, Women 2.0, and the Washington Post, among others. Additionally, she serves on the board for She Rocks the World and is working to organize the inaugural Massachusetts Girls’ Summit.

Academically she is particularly interested in the intersection of healthcare and technology. Pooja currently works as an undergraduate researcher at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering developing organ-on-chip models of the blood-brain barrier, helps design business and product development strategies for Barakat Bundle at the Harvard Innovation Lab, serves as an Executive Board Member for the South Asian Healthcare Leadership Forum, and is a Harvard Ventures Startup Fellow at Vaxess Technologies. On campus, she serves as the managing director and founding partner for the Medical Ventures Accelerator, one of the directors for the Harvard Women Engineers Code (WECode) Conference, a member of the public service freshman council, and was part of the team that organized HackHarvard, Harvard’s first hackathon.

Previously, she has interned at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (Janelia Research Campus) and spent three summers as a research intern in the MITRE Corporation Nanosystems and Emerging Technologies Group. In the future, Pooja aspires to pursue a career at the nexus of medicine, technology, and entrepreneurship.