We are happy to announce Josiah Hester as the keynote speaker for STEAM Leadership Conference 2025!

Josiah Hester is Associate Professor of Interactive Computing and Computer Science at Georgia Tech. He leads the newly formed Center for Advancing Responsible Computing at Georgia Tech's College of Computing and is on the executive leadership team for the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, one of the ten Interdisciplinary Research Institutes spanning all of Georgia Tech. Finally, he co-Directs the STRONG Manoomin Collective, a NSF-funded regional hub in the Western Great Lakes conducting Indigenous-led cyberinfrastructure co-design for sovereignty.

Josiah was previously at Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor. He works in sustainable computing broadly, and applies his work to health wearables, interactive devices, and large-scale sensing for conservation, supported by multiple grants from the NSF, NIH, ARPA-H, and the Department of Defense. He was named a Sloan Fellow in Computer Science, won his NSF CAREER, and a VMware Early Career Grant in 2022. He was named one of Popular Science's Brilliant Ten, won the American Indian Science and Engineering Society Most Promising Scientist Award, and the 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award in 2021. His work has received seven Best Paper type Awards, five Design awards, and seven Best Presentation type Awards, and been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, BBC, Popular Science, Communications of the ACM, and the Guinness Book of World Records, among many others.

In January 2025, Josiah was one of two Georgia Tech professors among 400 honorees to have earned the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on early-career engineers and scientists.

CONFERENCE THEME

Cultivating Curiosity: Nurturing the Relationship Between K-12 STEAM Education and Research Universities

This year's conference aims to celebrate and strengthen the dynamic relationship between K-12 STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) education and research universities. Focusing on our different strengths, we hope to foster curiosity, build upon inquiry-based learning, and cultivate a culture of lifelong learning and innovation. Through collaboration, partnership, and shared knowledge, we seek to empower educators, researchers, students, and community stakeholders to drive positive change in education and research.

AUDIENCE

Superintendents, curriculum coordinators, principals, academic coaches, content specialists, teacher leaders, artists, after-school coordinators, informal educators, researchers, curriculum developers, policymakers, industry professionals, and like-minded individuals who want to take STEAM teaching and learning to the next level.