New Delhi: IIT Delhi inaugurated the second batch of the STEM Mentorship Programme for High School Girls (Class 11) on Friday at an event organised to celebrate the 8th International Day for Women and Girls in Science, which is on February 11, 2023.

The Initiative for Gender Equity and Sensitisation (IGES, Office of Diversity and Inclusion) and the Office of Academic Outreach and New Initiatives (ONI) at IIT Delhi jointly organised the event.   

Prof. Rangan Banerjee, Director, IIT Delhi, inaugurated the second batch of the mentorship programme, which aims to encourage young schoolgirls to pursue their careers in STEM areas.

The second batch of the STEM Mentorship Programme will consist of two phases. During the first phase, the 32 selected participants from KVs, government and private schools in Delhi will learn from online lectures and demonstrations by faculty and students of IIT Delhi on diverse STEM topics, to be held over the weekends in March and April.

In the second phase, to be held in May, the participants will visit IIT Delhi for a week to visit different labs in the institute to get a first-hand exposure to cutting-edge research conducted at IIT Delhi.

The inaugural session was also addressed by Prof. Maya Ramanath, Computer Science and Engineering Department, IIT Delhi, and Dr. Sarita Ahlawat, Co-Founder and Managing Director at BotLab Dynamics, which is a startup focusing on swarm technology that enables many drones to fly autonomously and simultaneously to achieve the assigned tasks and create formations in the sky.

After the inaugural session, the schoolgirls were given a tour of Makerspace, a state-of-the-art Do-It-Yourself (DIY) facility at IIT Delhi.

The first mentorship programme for schoolgirls was launched in December 2021 by the Office of Academic Outreach and New Initiatives, IIT Delhi. The first batch of the 10 schoolgirls successfully completed the mentorship programme in June 2022.

The selected schoolgirls were mentored and guided by the IIT Delhi faculty members over a period of seven months on a varied range of topics such as artificial photosynthesis, water reuse using nanotechnology, theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, climate change, brain mapping and neuroscience, optics, vibrations in engineering, and engineering of human joint implants.

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