Mariia Shevchenko

Artist, Atheist, Brainstormer, Change Agent, Concerned citizen, Environmentalist, Event planner, Explorer, Student

I am passionate about knowledge and being the bridge for other people's achievement. I absolutely love learning which has led me to become a plant genome Arizona State University (ASU) researcher at 16 alongside a carbon scrubbing research project to combat climate change in cooperation with the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at ASU. My career plan is to become a physics professor as I would like to discover new ways of understanding the world around, and find the answers to current questions from the particles in the standard model to the vast galaxies. In my life I have been adorned with various gifts primarily through my privilege and I have made it my life goal to "pay back" those gifts. I have done this through being heavily involved in Unified Program for students with disabilities, creating a Unified STEAM club for the population to give opportunities for them to experience science, technology, engineering, art, and math where they otherwise might not, and being the secretary of a student femme led robotics team that has garnered 2100 hours of community outreach primarily through STEM. I truly am passionate about diversity as it has opened up my eyes and forced me to take action through vote canvassing back in November to ensure the rights of DACA recipients were secured and I have worked hard within my robotics team to create a robotics team in an LGBT+ youth center to create financial security opportunities in STEM for a population that is prone to poverty as a result of social discrimination.