Wonder Women: portraits for Hemisphere's magazine

I finally got to draw the real Wonder Women. They are 5 of the brightest young women in the tech industry and have all made real innovations in their fields, while founding their own companies. Here is a quick introduction:      Read the original article here.

Meredith Perry. Company: uBeam

“I’ve always had a crazy interest in science,” she says. “One thing I do is ask questions about everything, kind of obsessively.” Perry carries a notebook around with her, in which she keeps tabs on things that, in her opinion, need fixing. “I keep asking questions until I find the answer,” she says. “If I stumble across a problem, I’m going to solve it.”

Hannah Chung. Company Sproutel,

"Jerry looks like a Care Bear who has had his “tummy symbol” upgraded to a sleek, interactive screen. But before you dismiss him as just another high-tech distraction, note his most important feature: Jerry has type 1 diabetes, which makes him uniquely qualified to educate, entertain and comfort young patients.

Jerry was created by Hannah Chung, who teamed with fellow Northwestern alum Aaron Horowitz to found Sproutel, a startup devoted to inventing toys for kids with chronic illnesses. Diabetes proved a particular challenge: Children are often diagnosed between the ages of three and seven, when it’s difficult to master complex, critical concepts like carb counting. “We saw that these kids had plush animals and dolls,” Chung says, “and they were pricking their fingers, giving them insulin,” without any real idea of what they were actually doing."

Jessica O. Matthews. Company Uncharted Play

The easiest way to get someone to change,” says Jessica O. Matthews, co-founder and CEO of socially conscious sports gear startup Uncharted Play, “is to make it seem like they’re not changing at all.” For proof, look no further than her company’s offerings, which include the Soccket, a soccer ball that converts kicks into electric energy that powers a small LED lamp that is inserted into the ball.

Jessica Scorpio. Company: Getaround

There are a billion cars on the planet, and most sit idle 22 hours a day,” Jessica Scorpio says. It’s a staggering statistic and one that Scorpio mentions as the inspiration for her revolutionary peer-to-peer car-sharing service, Getaround.

Samantha John. Company Hopscotch

When Samantha John started building websites as a senior at Columbia University, she quickly realized that, like any language, computer programming was best learned at a young age. But how do you entice kids to code? Her app, Hopscotch, which she debuted last spring with partner Jocelyn Leavitt, turns programming into an intuitive building-block system, in which chunks of pre-written code can be combined to animate characters and have them react to stimuli in their virtual world. Think of it as Lego for the video game set.

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Author Erin Brady, Nicholas DeRenzo and Chris Wright Illustration Graham Smith, for Hemishphere's Magazine.