Megan Loh 2019 National Gold Award Girl Scout and a freshman at Stanford University

Megan Loh is a 2019 National Gold Award Girl Scout and a freshman at Stanford University interested in pursuing physics. She joined Girl Scouts when she was in Kindergarten. For her Gold Award project, she started a nonprofit organization, GEARup4Youth, to bridge the gender gap in technology, especially for underserved populations. With the help of over 200 volunteers and 200 partners, she has reached 13,500 girls and 24,000 youth worldwide.

Megan has been passionate about STEM, especially technology, ever since she was little. However, throughout her experiences working in the STEM field, she has seen the severity of gender stereotyping first-hand. When she realized that women, especially minorities, are critically underrepresented in technology, she set off to make a change. She launched her first girls-only programming class at a local library in 2015, and her programs began to gain popularity. Today, besides offering robotics/programming classes to underprivileged girls at eight Boys and Girls Clubs, she has hosted presentations in partnership with science museums, public libraries, and radio-stations; promoted familial support for girls in STEM during elementary school family events, and brought the fun of programming to Malaysia, making a global impact. She published her own book to reach a broader audience and stimulate more girls’ interests in STEM, which is available at online stores worldwide.

Since her Gold Award, Megan’s activism in the diversity, equity and inclusion sector has continued to grow. She has been a contributing author to two more books, one about socio-economic sustainable development with a focus on equity in education, and the other aimed to inspire young changemakers to incite change in their own communities. Academically, she has researched for three years with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and has started a new project investigating dark matter detection with the LHC.