Lauren Shum Selected as Student Delegate to G(irls)20 Summit

April 1, 2016

Lauren Shum, a junior in the Stiff-Roberts Research Group, was recently recognized as the sole delegate for the United States to the G(irls)20 Summit, a student delegation to the G20 Summit that seeks to call attention to the importance of increasing female labor force participation. (She was selected partly for her application video using the operating regimes in a pn-junction diode as a metaphor for empowerment.) She is one of 24 delegates, selected from 1300 applicants worldwide, who will jointly prepare a communiqué for consideration by the G20 leaders. In August, she will travel to Beijing, China to serve alongside these other young women: http://www.girls20.org/china-summit-2016/2016-delegates/.

Lauren, who is investigating potential ways of predicting the electrical properties of organic solar cells, was also recently named as one of seven in Pratt's Class of 2017 NAE Grand Challenge Scholars. Her selected focus is "making solar energy economical," and in her thesis, she plans to explore how technical design might interact with social and economic considerations to impact the lifecycle of a solar product. She was also chosen as one of Duke's four environmental nominees to the nationally competitive Udall Scholarship.