Global STEM Innovator Network

Maya Ajmera is the President and CEO of Society for Science & the Public and Publisher of the Science News Media Group. It is best known for its world-class science competitions, award winning magazine, Science News and its outreach and equity programs. 

In 1993, Maya founded and led for 18 years The Global Fund for Children (GFC), a nonprofit organization that invests in innovative, community-based organizations working with some of the world’s most vulnerable children and youth. Maya is also an award-winning children’s book author of more than 20 titles, including Children from Australia to Zimbabwe with more than 5 million readers worldwide.

Since 2013, Maya has held academic appointments at Duke University and Johns Hopkins University. Maya is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. Maya holds an A.B. from Bryn Mawr College and a M.P.P. from the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. 

There are more than two billion young people in the world today many who will face incredible challenges, but too few of them will ever become tomorrow’s scientists, engineers and innovators.

The Society for Science & the Public has built the largest pre-collegiate global STEM network. The focal point of this network is more than 420 science fairs in 80 countries, regions and territories and our science journalism, Science News. Even at this size, our programming reaches fewer than half the countries in the world and only a fraction of our youth.

Students competing in science fair break down cultural and economic barriers, create new industries and contribute to our global economy by witnessing problems only they can see inside their communities.

This network expansion project will provide opportunities for young people from all countries to find their own solutions to the world’s problems through scientific research and innovation.

Nearly half of the world’s population is under the age of 25, disproportionately living in the developing world. This “youth bulge” has been viewed as either a demographic dividend or a demographic disaster for our global economy and security. With so many additional people, there is an enormous burden on our planet. We believe that young people are our best hope for a better future.

There are thousands of societal challenges, which are both hyper local and global. We need solutions which are often driven by scientific research and its innovations. However, many of the world’s youth are not given opportunities to become scientifically literate and to develop solutions to the problems that surround them.

The current scientific elite are not even identifying many important problems plaguing communities because they do not have the local perspective. Whether it is climate change, improved agricultural practices, pandemic disease, tackling poverty or going to Mars, we need all people from across the globe to be prepared to work on inclusive scientific and engineering innovations.

Since 1950, we have a built a global STEM network in 80 countries with the focal point being science fairs and scientific literacy. With this project, we will add 100 countries to our network.

We believe the science fair method is simple and scalable with enormous impact on society. Ask a young person to find a problem meaningful to them, use science to better understand it and present their results.

We will know we are making progress when the technology platform we plan to build connects us to millions of additional students who are engaging in their local STEM fair and reading science journalism, especially traditionally underserved students. This data will provide us with the ability to demonstrate our impact, make adjustments to our network and provide alumni support across the globe.

This will have a broad impact on some of the hardest to reach countries and in some of the STEM deserts in the United States. With the localized nature of science fair projects, the project will also provide scientific solutions to local communities.

The direct beneficiaries of our project will be the millions of additional students, teachers and education systems involved in building the STEM pipeline.

There is a demand for STEM talent globally.

We believe this is a longitudinal project in which there is value in continuing to do the hard work of engaging with new countries and their untapped potential. Missing countries mean overlooking entire populations of students.

There are immediate benefits in participating in science fairs: students gain public speaking skills and learn to defend their research, interact and collaborate with like-minded young people; receive awards for support and admission to college; discover mentors; and find a pathway to highly valued careers. Students will have laid the groundwork to solve the world’s most intractable problems including local problems many of us in the western world would not even consider researching.

If we have the opportunity to scale to 100 more countries, this project will create the foundation for a broadly STEM literate society.  We will provide our new alumni with a network of hundreds of thousands of alumni to find collaborators, share employment opportunities and make a positive global impact.

The Society’s core values include ensuring that all young people have the support necessary to follow their passions and compete in science fairs as a path to STEM leadership and careers.

Our project is elevating opportunities for young people in mostly the developing world to become the next generation of STEM leaders. This project also leads to elevating issues, problems and discoveries from the student science fair projects by building awareness and networks globally.

For 70 years, we have created a vast network that contributes to the world’s employment pipeline in STEM. When I was asked to lead the Society for Science & the Public in 2014, we had about 420 science fairs in the United States and around the world that were affiliated with the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF). In the past 10 years, the network has added an additional 30 countries, regions and territories for a total of 80 countries. 

With many discussions with the senior team, it became evident to me that we needed to scale the affiliated science fair network to many more countries. We needed to add at least 100 more countries as part of our network. 

We were also backed up by many articles and papers on the importance of science fairs including Stresman, 2007; Bencze, 2009; and Dionne, 2012.  From a dissertation on the education system in Costa Rica, “students and teachers/administrators agreed that the science and technology fair policy has improved Costa Rica’s educational system and has improved the labor force. Overall, these groups agreed that STEM education and the science and technology fair are important to the future of Costa Rica,” (Marion, 2014). 

I am a science fair junkie. When I was a sixth grader, I worked in a Botany lab at East Carolina University working on a science project studying the growth of duckweeds. That experience and competing in my school and state science fairs paved the way for me to continue scientific research in high school and college. 

When I founded the Global Fund for Children right after college, I had the opportunity to travel globally and witness the extraordinary potential of young people. They wanted to become doctors, teachers, entrepreneurs, and engineers. 

When I was offered the job to become the President & CEO at Society for Science & the Public, I jumped at the opportunity. As an alumna of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, I was asked to transform the nearly 100-year-old Society into a dynamic, entrepreneurial organization. I spearheaded a $100 million sponsorship for the Science Talent Search with Regeneron. I brought Science News Media Group from a decade long deficit into a bullish enterprise by developing a new education pillar and diversifying it’s income stream. I also founded a new series of outreach and equity programs to reach more underserved STEM students in the United States.

As President & CEO of The Society for Science & the Public, my senior team and I are uniquely positioned in expanding the reach of our worldwide STEM network in light of the crippling youth bulge taking place in many parts of the world. 

Since 1950, we have built a global STEM network of science fairs with a robust community of young innovators, teachers and volunteers supported by the private and public sector. We have helped to found more than 420 of these self-sustaining fairs in 80 countries, regions and territories. We are proud that many of these science fairs are located in rural communities in the United States and in the developing world from South Africa to Zimbabwe to Peru to Azerbaijan. Each year we build a pipeline of approximately 200,000 STEM leaders.

The Society has an annual budget of $28 million and a staff of close to 100 people. This is our largest project with almost a third of our annual budget dedicated to this network.

The Society manages more than 1,000 volunteers annually for this project. In addition, our Affiliated Fair network encompasses hundreds of thousands of additional volunteers and millions of more dollars in investment in local STEM networks worldwide.

We are successful in reaching a broad community by working closely with STEM enthusiasts in each location including educators, government leaders and the private sector. We follow a grass roots approach to building our network and will continue to do so as we expand.

The Society for Science & the Public founded the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in 1950. It is is the largest pre-collegiate STEM competition in the world where nearly 2,000 young people (half of them girls) come from our affiliated science fair network from 80 countries, regions and territories to compete across 21 categories. We award over $5 million in awards. 

This year, ISEF was to be held in Anaheim, CA in May. Because of COVID-19, we had to make the difficult decision to cancel the 8,000 person gathering in March. I decided to make a very sharp pivot and build a five-day virtual ISEF to be unveiled in mid-May. With the senior team, we worked day and night to build a digital platform that would enable the finalists to showcase their projects including live chatting and presentations. Virtual ISEF also included over 80 acclaimed speakers and a STEM Experiential Hall. 

I was scared that only one person would show up which would be me. Instead, we had over 18,000 registrants from nearly 125 countries participate! We were able to pull this off because of a superb and brilliant team with whom I have the pleasure of working. 

In 1990, on a hot day in Bhubaneswar, India, I stepped off a train and was struck by an unusual sight—a group of children and a teacher were sitting in a circle completely engrossed in learning.

I approached the teacher and learned that the children lived, played and begged on the train platforms. A local organization – in its desire to provide the children with a pathway out of poverty – offered the children free education, clothing and food. This informal school instilled in the children a sense of self-worth and empowered them to determine their own futures.

It was a powerful model of grassroots change. I was inspired to found the Global Fund for Children in 1993, with support from Echoing Green, the fellowship for social entrepreneurs. I believed that small amounts of money, when given to innovative, community-based organizations, could make a lasting impact on the lives of the world’s most vulnerable young people. In my book Invisible Children, I call this my moment of obligation. The train platform schools became the first GFC grassroots partner.

GFC grew from a seedling vision into one of the largest networks of grassroots organizations working on behalf of vulnerable children. 

I selected non-profit. I believe, we are a social enterprise. I am publisher of Science News that is supported by a combination of print and digital subscribers (120,000), members, individual donors, corporate sponsors, and foundations. Our competitions are supported by sponsorships. 

The Society’s network reaches 80 countries, regions and territories and all 50 U.S. states in rural and urban areas. For example, we have 12 fairs in Puerto Rico alone. We are in big cities like Chicago and small towns like Williston, North Dakota. We are in Oman and Kazakhstan and Zimbabwe and Brazil. We are successful in reaching a broad community by working closely with educators, government leaders and the private sector. We follow a grass roots approach to building our network and will continue to do so as we expand. 

Two recent movies that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, Science Fair and Inventing Tomorrow, also demonstrate the demand and impact of our network. Countries as diverse as Costa Rica, India, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam have made the case for science fair strongly enough to garner Ministry of Education support

Context

1. There is a youth bulge, disproportionately in developing countries.

2. STEM pervades every aspect of our lives and can solve the world’s most intractable problems.

3. Too few young people globally are scientifically literate or experience project-based learning,especially STEM research. If that persists, we will continue to have a huge gap of people we need to tackle problems like climate change and health disparities.

4. Science fairs are a simple and scalable method to help large numbers of young people.

Assumptions

1. We have 70 years of accumulated knowledge, experience and evidence of building more than 420 science fairs in 80 countries, regions and territories around the world which will enable us to scale into other countries.

2. Bringing our network and science journalism to more countries will positively impact millions of students and their engagement with STEM, which will create solutions to both hyper local and global problems.

Evidence

1. We are one of the world’s most well-recognized STEM organizations.

2. Our expansive network of alumni worldwide, whom we track, are recognized as leading scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and innovators.

 3. We have millions of readers of Science News and Science News for Students.

Enablers

1. We have the experience-having built our network starting in 1950 and science journalism in 1921. (internal enabler)

2. Every fair is supported by an ecosystem of local volunteers, schools/universities, companies and government entities. (external enabler)

3. Success depends on new locations finding STEM leaders to build the networks. (external enabler)

1) We currently serve over 250,000 young people each year through our affiliated science fair system. Of the young people who compete in our fairs, the top 2,000 are elevated at finalists for the International Science and Engineering Fair. 

2) Because of COVID-19, we are hoping that as we scale we will not loose momentum in scaling the numbers of young people we reach. We are hoping to reach 300,000 young people. 

3) In five years, we hope to reach one million young people competing in science fairs in at least 180 countries or more. This will be dependent on raising financial resources to scale the network. 

The focal point of our STEM network is science fair and our science journalism. Currently, our STEM network reaches 80 countries, regions and territories. We want to scale our network into ~100 additional countries. We are confident that we can scale because in the past decade, we have added 30 countries to our network. 

The cornerstone of this effort will be the Educator Academy, which provides delegations from each new country with significant training to become part of our network. At the Academy, delegations learn from their peers from other countries who have built successful STEM ecosystems. They will learn about the processes and systems to build a science fair community in their country. The Educator Academy is held at the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), the culminating global fair, which showcases students from all of the fairs around the world. ISEF provides inspiration to the new countries to be part of a global community of innovators. 

Our goal is to have our entire STEM network connected to a new technology platform in order to better track data. This will also streamline the process as students move through the pipeline from their fair to ISEF.

Within this global network, we also want to bring world class science content to inspire new ideas. Our journalism, Science News and Science News for Students only reaches English speaking readers. We want to translate our content into at least four additional languages (Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and French).

There are many barriers to a global project of this scale. Each country has its own unique set of barriers. These include: differences in education systems, resource constraints, civil conflicts, political climates that may be hostile to science or countries that are on the edge of survival. Even in the United States, the public education system has significant weaknesses and many communities do not focus on STEM as part of their curriculum leading to an abundance of STEM deserts throughout the country as stated by Dr. Raj Chetty’s paper, The Lost Einsteins. 

We are able to overcome these barriers by working to build our network locally, finding leadership at the community level. We also have a large network with a significant history of working in places that are often overlooked from Greybull, Wyoming to Booneville, Mississippi to Ramallah, Palestine to Erbil, Iraq to Zimbabwe to the Northern Mariana Islands.

1. Planning: Staff and volunteer leaders target new locations. 

2. Partnership Development: Identify and engage with education and STEM leaders, community members/potential volunteers, students, parents, NGOs, industry and government ministries in 100 countries to build science fair network.

3. Technology: Build state-of-the-art platform to support entire network for STEM abstracts, data, results tracking, etc. 

4. Educator Academy: Training for delegations consisting of ~10 individuals per country for a total of 200-300 people meeting at ISEF, our culminating global fair. Staff and experienced fair leaders develop and run the program. Includes follow-up full year of comprehensive support. 

5. Global Science Literacy: Translation of our journalism into Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and French and related marketing and revenue plan to reach 50 million new readers. 

6. Network Growth: Support for new fair locations following Academy training. Reach expands to 1,000,000 students annually. 

7. Alumni Support: Track data on millions of alumni from local fairs with virtual and in-person programming offered. 

8. Communications: Ensure global visibility with website, press, social media and additional media channels. 

9.  Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning: Executing formal external assessment on impact, informal check-ins, collecting/documenting qualitative feedback and data, piloting/testing products and policies, evaluations and assessments and using feedback to modify plan.

The focal point of our global STEM network is the science fair. Currently our 420 affiliated fairs are self sustaining. Each of the fairs have local leadership and are either affiliated with a university, part of the government, school system or an independent organization. They are supported by public and private resources. 

One aspect of the Educator Academy (written about in a previous question) will provide expertise and guidance on ways to become self-sustaining. After reaching scale, we do not anticipate activating the Educator Academy.

The costs of building our platform are significant, but we believe the maintenance costs will be absorbed by the affiliated fees from the science fairs to compete in our International Science and Engineering Fair.

We will need some resources to support more young people coming through the local fair pipeline. We have more than 70,000 alumni in our network globally and many of them are important volunteers and donors to our organization.

We are supported by Regeneron as the title sponsor of the International Science and Engineering Fair with additional support from National Geographic, Broadcom Foundation, Microsoft Azure Sphere, Johnson & Johnson and others. We need to find funders who will help us scale our project. 

We are happy to provide details to interested parties including the judging panel and potential funders. 

We are happy to provide details to interested parties including the judging panel and potential funders. 

We are happy to provide details to interested parties including the judging panel and potential funders. 

The Elevate Prize has the potential to transform the Society's ability to overcome barriers. The Prize will allow the Society to collect data that will allow the Society to better address the local differences and see commonalities between issues happening on the ground and develop solutions to them. Through the Educator Academy, best practices will be developed using input from educators on the ground in each country or STEM desert location to meet challenges as they arise. 

We have had difficulty getting the attention of funders to scale this important STEM network. We are in need of mentorship--but more importantly opening doors to interested funders.