Niaja is currently working as a Director of Engineering at Fuzzy helping pets and pet parents get the care and support they need. With over 10 years of programming experience, she embodies a lifelong passion for learning, helping others and tackling new problems. In 2016, she completed her PhD from MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. While at MIT, she designed, built and tested the motors for a quadruped cheetah robot and also founded i-Trek. i-Trek takes a non-traditional approach to mentorship through research combined with entrepreneurial and professional skill development. For her PhD work she explored how wearables can be used to induce behavior change through the development of several applications and user studies. After graduation she spent 8 months in Japan working with IBM Tokyo. Her contribution included teaching Pepper, a humanoid robot, how to assist the growing elderly population in Japan. In addition to working full-time as a developer and continuing the work of i-Trek, she is a mother and avid reader. When not working, she can often be found exploring a new city or country, training for a race or taking walks while listening to never ending rotation of podcasts.Specialties: Software development, ruby, rails, frontend website development, project management and leadership.