Publications

Anika Asthana is a senior at Notre Dame High School in San Jose, California. 

Passionate about gender issues, she was a special guest in Bonita Banducci’s 

“Gender and Engineering” Graduate Engineering Program class as a sophomore in high school. 

She proposed writing a paper on the research being done on Collective Intelligence. As a research intern, she has spent two years coding documents and compiling information from research building on the original work done by MIT and Carnegie Mellon’s work on Collective Intelligence for Professor Banducci’s upcoming book. This summer, she wrote a paper suggesting how Banducci’s framework of gender competencies and communication adds a new dimension of additional competencies “relational” people bring to collective intelligence.

Anika took her passion to make a difference into action when she also created a nonprofit called Step It Up, which empowers young girls for success in the business world. The original curriculum teaches career prep skills in clubs at 5 high schools across California.