Edison resident and Middlesex County Academy student, Swathi Parthibha, has been honored with the SWENext Global Innovator Award for her passion for engineering, her role in inspiring young girls to pursue engineering and her strong leadership skills.
Swathi was honored alongside her peers at a formal ceremony at the Society of Women Engineers’ (SWE) annual conference and career fair, WE18, on Oct. 20 in Minneapolis.
“SWENext is an opportunity for SWE to nurture our future generation of engineers, providing them with resources to help them learn more about engineering and exposing them to other women engineers who can help them along the way,” Randy Freedman, director of Student Programs at SWE, said in a prepared statement. “This is the fourth year of our SWENext Awards program, and we couldn’t be more pleased with the level of enthusiasm and commitment these girls already have for a future in engineering. Swathi has been an exemplary role model in her community, and we are confident that with her passion for engineering, and her commitment to the community, Swathi will do great things.”
Swathi developed her interest in engineering through a fascination for robotics. This passion led her to participating in FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics for the past seven years, and she is currently a programmer on an internationally competing FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) team, according to the statement.
She has also mentored a FIRST LEGO team and currently teaches at a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education center in her town, where she immerses elementary school students in the fundamentals of robotics and programming.
At school, Swathi takes a rigorous Electronics and Computer Engineering Technology course and is co-president of Middlesex County Academy’s chapter of the Technology Student Association. She also serves as the technology lead of the Student Leadership Committee at Junior Achievement of NJ.
Sponsored by major companies such as Verizon, Swathi leads an organization of bi-annual 24-hour hack-athons for high-school students with the goal of immersing high-school students in computer science and monthly coding fairs for middle-school students, according to the statement.
Swathi recently completed a research internship at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, generating a computer model for use in magnetic drug targeting. Earlier this year, she received the SWENext Local Innovator Award at WE Local Providence, a local SWE conference and career fair in Rhode Island, according to the statement.
“Growing up I was discouraged to pursue engineering because my interests, such as video games and coding, weren’t shared by other girls my age,” Swathi said in the statement. “I don’t want any girl to feel this way because by hiding these parts of my life, I was essentially stripping away the uniqueness I possess. Because of my strong beliefs and passion for computer science, I constantly work toward getting more girls involved in STEM.”
For more information about SWENext, visit societyofwomenengineers.swe.org/swenext. For more information about the Society of Women Engineers, visit www.swe.org.
