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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/401116
MacDirectory 23 Best known as the first woman of color in space, Jemison is currently leading 100 Year Starship (100YSS), an initiative funded by DOD's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) to achieve the capability for human interstellar space travel within the next 100 years. Jemison is a physician, engineer, educator and entrepreneur, and went aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour as a NASA astronaut for six years. She also started The Jemison Group, Inc., a technology consulting firm integrating critical socio-cultural issues into the design, development and implementation of engineering and science projects. As the Principal for the 100YSS foundation, she is leading the charge for human travel beyond our solar system in order to generate knowledge and technologies that will benefit humanity in the near-term and future. She reminds people that many of the technologies we now use every day were created as space technologies and then adapted for additional purposes. "It's really that pursuit of something extraordinary tomorrow that builds a better world today," she told NewEurope. Jemison not only aims to help the world evolve toward sustainability and sustainable space travel, but to make the quest inclusive – not just for "rocket scientists and billionaires." www.drmae.com Reshef is taking on the world of higher education by offering the world's first non-profit, tuition-free, accredited, degree-granting online university. He hopes to help transform higher education "from being a privilege for the few to a basic right, affordable and accessible for all." Reshef created University of the People to provide anyone in the world who has a high school education with college- level classes toward a bachelor's or associate's degree in business administration or computer science— fields with high job prospects. Arts and science courses are also offered to add breadth to each student's educational experience and to provide opportunities to make interdisciplinary connections. Students are asked to pay a one-time application fee of $50 and subsequent exam processing fees of $100 per course. There are no other fees and there are scholarships and support to assure that students aren't left behind for financial reasons. The school relies on professors from elite institutions around the world who volunteer their time freely. The university is partnered with New York University and is affiliated with the United Nations GAID, the Clinton Global Initiative, and Yale Law School ISP. It has admitted several thousand students from more than 140 countries. Industrial engineer and eco-entrepreneur Shubhendu Sharma has made it easy to plant maintenance-free, wild and biodiverse forests in barren lands. Normally, a forest planted by humans and then left to nature takes at least 100 years to mature, he says, but people can make the process ten times faster and create a mini-forest ecosystem anywhere. Sharma was working at Toyota in India when he met Japanese forest expert Akira Miyawaki, who had arrived to plant a forest at the factory using a methodology for faster growing. Sharma interned with Miyawaki and developed Afforest, a company that promotes a standardized method for seeding dense, fast-growing, native forests. The method can create a system that allows a multilayer forest of 300 trees to grow on an area as small as the parking spaces of six cars, he says— for less than the price of an iPhone. Sharma credits his forests with improvement in air quality, an increase in biodiversity, and production of fruit. His company is developing a platform to analyze soil quality and allow them to offer step-by-step instructions to anyone who wants to grow a forest anywhere in the world. www.facebook.com/shubzsharma fACES: wHo IS mAkIng An ImPACT In THE worLd TodAy? By HEATHEr CASPI Dr. Mae C. Jemison Shai Reshef Shubhendu Sharma DePartMent