Erika KaplanErika co-founded the Blockchain club. As president of the club, she has inspired peers to pursue their interests in groundbreaking technologies that are not taught in typical Cal Poly courses.
Emerging technologies have been leveraged to catalyze economic growth, but what about personal growth? This is something my friend Erika has committed to exploring—using technology as scaffolding to overcome our personal boundaries. Erika understood early on that it is up to the developers deploying emerging technologies to determine how these tools will be used in the world, and that is what inspired her initiatives.
I met Erika in her 3rd year after she quit her job at Amazon to start Blockchain at Cal Poly, a student run education and development platform exploring the implementation of blockchain technologies. At the same time, she had developed several computer vision research projects such as ASDetect, a smartphone application testing the ability to use eye tracking for the early stage detection of autism. More recently, she took 3rd place in the Innovation Quest startup competition by combining these two areas of research into HealthBlock, a mobile, remote research platform leveraging mobile computing and blockchain technologies to bridge researchers and participants. After graduation, she will be joining Humu, a startup in Mountain View developing a nudge engine for workplace happiness, where here she hopes to continue her manifestation of enabling technologies. Erika has the courage and ability to not only explore adjacent possibles, but to address the grand challenges of humanity, and I cannot wait to see where her work takes her. Written by: Eric Cuellar, friend |