Genius Awards
Alike fashion designers who initiate trends or create garments that inspire us, these young women initiate change and innovation for the better good in ourselves and world. What is more motivating and inspiring than that? Especially when you take in the age and how much they have accomplished. When we came across this article in ELLE mag, we just had to share. Here are 5 women under 30 who hit it home for us:
MEREDITH PERRY, 22
"Convincing the world that a blond girl with no engineering degree can come up with technology that actually works" has been a challenge, says Meredith Perry. Yet fresh out of the University of Pennsylvania she's invented a transmitter, called UBeam, that can recharge laptops, cell phones, and tablets cordlessly, using ultrasonic waves. At energy hot spots in public spaces, "all you'll have to do is lift your phone in the air and charge it." —Catherine Straut
UBAH HASSAN, 25
Ubah Hassan is a runway model and an Oxfam America Sisters on the Planet ambassador, and in February she launched Maji Umbrellas (maji means "water" in Swahili). Each $40 umbrella sold by the nonprofit provides a day's worth of clean water for 20 people in the Horn of Africa, where water shortages grow more desperate each year. "In North America, rain is something we don't want," Hassan says. "We hope with our umbrellas to [teach people to] say, 'It's raining again! Thank you, God, I have rain.'"—Elyse MoodyALEXA VON TOBEL, 28
Alexa von Tobel was a Harvard grad with a prime job on Wall Street, yet she was lost when it came to the basics of her personal finances. "I couldn't understand how a topic that's so critical wasn't being taught in high schools or colleges," she says. So she created what she thought was missing. LearnVest is an online financial planning platform that links all your bank and credit card accounts in one place, and offers money-managing tips, newsletters, courses, certified financial planners for customized support, and five-year financial forecasts, for only a couple hundred dollars. "There's this conundrum that, in order toget a financial plan, you have to have thousands of dollars, but you need a financial plan to properly build your wealth," von Tobel says. "Financial planning shouldn't be a luxury."—Catherine Straut
EDEN FULL, 20
"At 13 I realized there were better things to be doing than class," says Eden Full. Six years later she made good on that realization, quitting Princeton for a $100,000 Thiel fellowship to invent the SunSaluter, a $10 device that enables solar panels to track the sun's trajectory across the sky, increasing their efficiency by up to 40 percent.—Diana Kapp
DANIELA WITTEN, 28
"Amazon and Google use algorithms for displaying ads and recommending books for you to read," says the University of Washington assistant professor. "I develop the same types of algorithms, but for denoting the human genome," helping scientists make connections between genes and disease.—Catherine Straut
