Audio File:& Download MP3Transcript:& Lucy Sanders: & Hi this is Lucy Sanders, the CEO, co‑founder of NCWIT. The National Center for Women and Information Technology. We have another one of our really fabulous interviews today with women who have been very successful in the entrepreneurial space. Today we're interviewing a woman who has experience across for profit and the non‑profit entrepreneurial sectors. Larry Nelson: & Good. Lucy: & Good. With me is Larry Nelson, w3w3.com. Hi Larry. Larry: & Hi, I'm really happy to be here. I really loved your site and our listeners are going to learn it. A number of wonderful lessons and were posted on our home page and NCWIT channel as well as a podcast directory and blog. Of course, we're in really shine is on the ncwit.org site. Lucy: & Yes, very excited about that. Today we're talking to Christina Wallace and as I mentioned before, Christina has a lot of experience in both for profit and the non‑profit sectors. She was also named as one of Mashables 44 female founders to know. Now, all of our listeners are going to know Christina. Larry: & There you go. Lucy: & That's absolutely awesome. Today she's the founding partner of BridgeUp: STEM and certainly near and dear to our heart. For those of you listening, STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering and Math and BridgeUP: STEM is a new educational initiative at the American Museum of Natural History and it's focused on introducing girls and minorities to computer science again, something that we care passionately about. Before her role at BridgeUP STEM, she was vice‑president at Startup Institute and the founder and CEO of Venture Back eCommerce brand, Quincy Apparels. A management consultant with Boston Consulting Group, who we used to hire when I worked at AT&T, and an arts manager at the Metropolitan Opera. Wow, what a span of things. I can't wait to hear about it in addition to, she has an MBA from Harvard University. Christina, welcome. We're really happy to have you here. Before we start and get into the interview questions maybe just a little bit more for listeners about BridgeUp: STEM. I'm sure they'll be curious to know what you're up to there. Christina Wallace: & Sure, we're very excited. We're about six months into a five year grant to build BridgeUP: STEM. Helen Gurly Brown Foundation was very generous in being our founding partner to support this. It is a new portfolio of programs actually. There's several pieces of this that we're building over the next five years at the museum, really focused on diversifying the pipeline of talent going into STEM. Really trying to get more girls, more minorities, under‑served students into the pipeline, getting them into computer science and encouraging them and inspiring them. Our first piece of initiative is what we call our Brown Scholars Program and that is intended as an intensive two‑year after school program for 9th and 10th grade girls to come to the museum two days a week after school and we'll teach them to code in python. We'll introduce them to some statistics and data science and a little bit of algorithms and databases and data visualization. We'll do that through using the scientific data sets here and letting them become mini data scientists. Getting to play with genome data, getting to play with our digital universe atlas of the universe and, in their second year, do real research with some of our scientists here and the opportunity to really contribute to some of the work being done. That's our first big kick off for this program. Our girls start in our first cohort in February and we'll do another cohort sort of every trimester. Fall, Spring and Summer for the next few years. Then we're adding additional programming this summer for middle school students, boys and girls, trying to get out into the boroughs of New York City so it's not just somet