At the young age of 21, Olivia Pavco-Giaccia is already the founder & CEO of LabCandy, a social enterprise whose mission is to encourage young girls’ interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics). She also wrote and published an interactive children’s book, Ava and the Copper Key, which allows its readers to write in a science journal, create their own hypotheses, and help the main character, Ava, save the day.

When she isn’t running LabCandy, Olivia is a workshop leader at Yale’s Entrepreneurial Institute, a member of the Champions Board of the National Girls Collaborative Project, and a cellist in both the Yale Symphony Orchestra and the Low Strung Cello Rock Group. She has been featured as a national innovator for positive change at NationSwell and as a 2015 winner of Glamour’s annual Top Ten College Women competition. She was awarded second place in a Google pitch contest for business case presentations for start-ups and was a semi-finalist in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology for her research at Stanford University. And in the past, Olivia founded and organized the first marching band program in the Kibera area of Nairobi, Kenya, the Rock the World Music Program’s Children of Kibera Marching Band.

Beyond maintaining her high GPA at Yale and balancing all of her demanding extracurriculars, Olivia and LabCandy are changing the way that young women look at science and at themselves.

To find the full article and the interview with Olivia, check out this link