Presented by Dr. Kit August, IEEE; Researcher and Educator SDG 4: Education Access and Role Models in STEM
Organized by The Light Millennium Global, in support of the Observance of the International Day of Education #EducationDay2026
In collaboration with the Coalition for the #CompulsoryPeaceICTsCampaign #7
Aligned with the UNESCO 2026 Dedication Theme: “The Power of Youth in Co-Creating Education”
• Booklet (including brief bios of the speakers).

“When students meet role models to collaborate, STEM becomes human“

[LMGlobal.Org] Thank you so much. My name is Kit August and I’m about to share some ideas and thoughts with you that are not just mine; they represent a large population of people we’ve been collaborating with. Getting back to the SDGs, I’m going to do my best with these slides—I am a nervous speaker, I have stage fright, but I know this is a friendly audience so I hope you’ll have some patience with me.

What I’m going to talk about is when students meet role models to collaborate, STEM becomes human. Many of the people in our team are working with students, or they are students, or they’re teachers, or they’re professionals in industry, or they’re retired. This represents lifelong learning. These are people who reach out to experts and technology and share that in their collaborations.

I think this man [referring to slide] has been in the room today in every presentation. This is the person who invented Artificial Intelligence at Bell Labs. This year we celebrate a convergence of anniversaries and purpose with education, access, and role models. We’re celebrating the 150th anniversary of Alexander Graham Bell’s famous patent and his collaboration with Lewis Latimer, who was the patent draftsman. These are role models—people at a moment in time with technology where the world was changing.

I want to point out one of my role models from childhood: the first woman in North America who got a degree in computer science. She was a nun. She had a strong influence on our schools in Brooklyn because she told us we had to learn our math because computers were going to be very important. What we’re learning by collaborating is how to learn again. We’re learning how to look to the past to see who was around, what they did, and how they thought. We’re learning how to make collaborations that are better than anything you could do by yourself alone.

I have some statistics here about what kinds of technology people have access to. This is important so we know who we’re reaching and if it’s making a difference. Recently, we founded a number of new IEEE student chapters at universities in New Jersey and put together a poster competition. These students came with us to Washington D.C. to present their ideas to the Radio Club of America.

Yesterday we recorded information about this milestone of the Alexander Graham Bell patent and the collaboration with Lewis Latimer. His parents were enslaved persons; he had not experienced freedom in his childhood, but he was able to participate fully as an inventor and documented his work. He learned whatever he had to learn on his own. That’s what we all have to do.

I want to pause on the Math Project mentioned by Arianna. We are looking at how we can take equations from famous papers and learn how to interpret them so that people can actually read them. We speak in math in engineering, and that can be a barrier for people understanding the world. We’re making a standard for how to read these equations. We’re going to build a system that helps people ‘caption’ equations so technology can use text-to-speech or hands-free applications. We believe this will reduce the boundaries people have and make sure they can actually enter the STEM field. We’re also putting together documentation so people share in the collaboration of creating the documents and then learn from them.

©2026, The Light Millennium – www.lmglobal.org