What inspired the Ada Fellowship?

The Ada Fellowship is based on the model pioneered by the Insight Data Science Fellowship. The Insight Fellowship was designed to help PhDs and post-docs transition out of academia into the tech industry. Insight Fellows not only learned industry standard tools but created individual projects that they presented to companies like Google, Amazon, Meta and more. The Ada Fellowship founders Kyle and Mariela both went through the Insight Fellowship and then worked for them as leads of their data science programs. Kyle and Mariela were directly responsible for preparing fellows to work in the data science and machine learning industry and guiding them through interview pipelines at both small and large companies. While at Insight, they helped launch countless careers in the tech industry.

They now want to bring that proven model to a younger generation, helping high school students prepare for careers in STEM. The Ada Fellowship follows the same principles the Insight Data Science Fellowship was built on, with a combination of hard skills and immersion in real world problems tackled by data scientists, adapted for the needs and interests of high school students. Rather than being focused on placing fellows into jobs, the Ada Fellowship works toward a variety of goals, including preparing students for high-caliber internships, building strong portfolios for college admissions and mentoring students as they consider their path through higher education.

About the founders

Kyle Frankovich received his B.S. in psychology from The University of Pittsburgh. From there he went on to do his PhD in cognitive neuroscience at the University of California, Davis. His graduate work focused on utilizing electrophysiology to help understand how the human visual attention system works. During grad school he became interested in pursuing a career in data science. When he returned to Chicago following grad school, he completed the Insight Data Science remote fellowship, and then was offered a role at Insight to take over the remote program itself. As Data Science Lead at Insight, he was directly responsible for placing over a hundred fellows at top-tier tech companies. Following his work at Insight, he then went on to work at Apple. He's now the founder of the Ada Fellowship.

Mariela Perignon received a B.S. and M.S. in Earth Sciences from MIT, followed by a PhD in geomorphology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. There, she built computational models of fluid dynamics to understand how sediment moves across landscapes during large floods. As a postdoc, she used machine learning to study how climate change is likely to affect the Ganges River delta in Bangladesh. Looking to apply those skills to more practical (and solvable) problems, she completed the Insight Data Science fellowship and took a position as a data scientist at Strong Analytics in Chicago. She then went back to Insight as a Data Science Lead in the remote program and later served as the technical lead for the data science R&D team at Arity. She's now a founding member of the Ada Fellowship.