Sophia Crowder is a Student Ambassador for Higher Orbits, a STEMflights aviation scholar,  a Space Coast Scholar of the Virginia Space Grant Consortium/NASA-Wallops, & founder of a girl-empowering initiative, ITGirls. Sophie aspires to inspire the next generation of STEMists, Innovators, and Space Explorers. While she welcomes the possibility of becoming an astronaut someday, her biggest aspiration is to be an innovator for the space program as an engineer and test pilot! Aside from STEM, Sophie is also an avid musician (she plays the violin and guitar), a trained fencer and martial artist, a community theatre actor, and a multi-awarded essayist, speaker, and student leader. She is a staunch advocate for gender equity and serves as a board member for Être Girls, as well as founded an initiative (ItGirls) to help empower other girls to pursue non-traditional career pathways such as those in IT & STEM. She is 16 years old. 

Ever since she was little, she had an obsession with dinosaurs and that led her to curiosity about space science. Since then, she has been looking up to the skies for inspiration trying to find answers to questions that make us think about our place and purpose in the universe. All of that wrapped up in her love for aerospace and wanting to be a pilot and who knows, maybe an astronaut, someday! 

Sophia hopes to one day be an innovator for the space program whether as an engineer and/or as a test pilot, in whatever capacity she can best contribute to the advancement of science and space exploration. 

It’s very important to her to be able to help inspire others in whatever she does, even now as a student and young gender-equity advocate. Sophia thinks there is so much to be done to empower girls and women everywhere (especially those in the STEM fields) to believe that they, too, can make a difference and make the world a better place with what they do. She is an active advocate for female empowerment, not only with the initiatives she founded (ITGirls & STEMsquad) but also in many organizations and platforms that try to address the under-and-misrepresentation of girls and women throughout the world and across many fields and industries. It’s important that other girls and women see that there are those who try and make it, that to her is the best way to help inspire and empower the next generation.