With our first Parent-Daughter STEM Workshop just a month away, we wanted to feature some of the STEM mentors you will get to meet and talk with at the workshop. These women come from diverse backgrounds and work in different STEM fields in the Portland Metro area. Check back over the next few weeks to learn about some of the amazing female STEM professionals who volunteer with STEM Like a Girl!
This week’s Wednesday’s Women in STEM Series features STEM Like a Girl Founder and President, Sarah Foster. When Foster was in high school, she really liked math and science. All her teachers told her to either be a doctor or a science teacher so she went to college as a premed major. Foster quickly realized that she didn’t want to go to medical school and one of her professors asked if she ever considered engineering. It was at that point that her love of engineering was born. She loved everything about engineering: getting a problem and trying to come up with solutions, working in teams, improving on things so they worked better or more efficiently.
“The best part about being an engineer is solving problems. Most of the time, the solution doesn’t come easily and there are a lot of ‘failures’ that come first. But if you don’t see them as failures and instead ask what you can learn from each attempt, you can come up with even better solutions!”
Foster got her undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering and her master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering. When she first started her career as an engineer, she worked at a biotechnology company in the Biomaterials Department as a Research Engineer. She helped develop hydrogel polymers that could be implanted in the body after surgery to help wound healing and prevent adhesions from forming as the tissue healed. These hydrogels could also be used to deliver drugs to a targeted location in the body. She later worked for a small biotech company that made wound care materials for veterinary uses. When she started, the company was growing and needed to increase synthesis of the wound healing hydrogel so she was in charge of the scale up and testing of several products.
While not currently using her degrees in a traditional sense, Foster now spends her days planning STEM Like a Girl workshops which includes testing out different projects and activities. She is passionate about educating youth, specifically girls, and their families in STEM activities and hopes to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.