CUNY CREST Institute Staff, Carolina Perez, selected as a 2022 UBS X Luminary Fellow
Carolina Perez is the Administrative Associate of the CUNY CREST Institute. She was first introduced to CUNY CREST through her work with the High School Initiative in Remote Sensing of the Earth Systems Engineering and Science (HIRES). In the summer of 2020, Carolina first began by hosting professional development workshops for the HIRES interns. In 2021, she became part of the staff and was able to serve as one of the coordinators for the program.
In 2019, Carolina and co-founders began their own organization, STEM Hive. STEM Hive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization originally founded in New York City. The organization supports underrepresented students who have an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by providing them hands-on workshops, near peer mentoring, and are currently developing an online reward gaming system to engage young student’s interests. The community of students in STEM Hive learn skills in the different areas of STEM (such as Ecology, Cybersecurity, Coding, Statistics, Programing, Physics etc.), each workshop exposes students to different career opportunities in STEM. STEM Hive was one of the winning startup teams for the Zahn Innovation Center’s Startup Incubator Competition in 2019 at the City College of New York for the “Women + Tech 4NYC” track, sponsored by Standard Chartered.
Ever since 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, STEM Hive had to move to a virtual platform in order to host their workshops for students. They hosted workshops and mentoring events through ZOOM. As a result, they have lost students because most parents were unable to register their students to join. Carolina decided to apply for the UBS X Luminary fellowship because it targets businesses that are woman of color led and were heavily impacted by the COVID pandemic.
UBS X Luminary launched their second annual UBS X Luminary Fellowship program. Including STEM Hive, there were 75 fellowships awarded. Luminary is a global membership-based growth platform founded by Cate Luzio to uplift women on their entrepreneurial journey. They also serve as a community of other business internationally and co-working space. Luminary hosts their fellowship in collaboration with Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), Unilever, Verizon, and Indeed.
CUNY CREST and HIRES team are extremely proud of Carolina’s accomplishments and wish her many more achievements and success in years to come.
Congratulations Carolina!!
