Poornima Peiris: Leading Hope For the Future of STEM

At first, she didn’t know what M.D. stood for; Now, she is a rising leader in helping reshape STEM for women. Poornima Peiris is a Sri Lanka-born graduate student who attended Harvard University, worked with the NASA Space grant, and is now the founder of her own organization STEMCORPS to help STEM students in need. But, before becoming who she is today, she was a regular 18 year old student at Stony Brook University attending a college tour with her parents. During the tour, she was given a slip of paper where she was asked to checkmark what degree she would want to pursue in the future. Seeing the letters M.D and PhD, she had no idea what they stood for nor had a strong interest in pursuing a career in STEM.  This is where her story begins. 

Her Story

Poornima immigrated to the United States from Sri Lanka to start high school in the Americas. When she graduated, she decided to attend Stony Brook University for her undergraduate education. But, she didn’t know that she would be pursuing a degree in STEM. Being the first person to attend college in the United States, she didn’t know anyone or anything and was a pioneer in her family to navigate her pathway into STEM. 

She says her journey in STEM to where she is now was most motivated by the professors and opportunities she received from Stony Brook University. These opportunities combined with her hard work and countless nights without sleep lead her to graduate with a degree in Engineering and attend Harvard University for her Masters. Now, she is enrolling as a doctor of engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

As she found her pathway in Engineering, she couldn’t help but notice that in many of her classes there were no female students in any of her Engineering courses. Seeing this, Poornima wanted to do something different and challenging in her STEM career. This motivation for something different and challenging ended up starting a global mission in promoting STEM accessibility to women and underserved communities around the world. A few years later to the present, she is shaking up the STEM community with her mission.

Her Mission

To empower her mission to bring equality and accessibility in STEM, Poornima is working with the SciCommunity and with her own organization “STEM It Up” to expand her mission globally. The SciCommunity is a STEM organization with a globally active social media platform where they advocate for different underserved STEM communities around the world. Poornima’s involvement in the Scicommunity started during the pandemic where she started an initiative “Follow Fridays” where she asked individuals in the science community to ask about their work so that they could advocate and spread awareness of their STEM works during times, especially in the pandemic, where resources and advocacy were limited to online. 

In her own initiative with STEMcorps, she promoted various communities of women in STEM such as LGBTQ+ and African American communities. She held panels and social media “take-overs” which gave these women in STEM an opportunity to share their voice surrounding their own work and experience within STEM. Her dedication everyday to advocate and repeat expanded her mission reaching global audiences including the Supermodel Karlie Kloss who posted on her page @kodewithklossy, tagging Poornima and spotlighting her work.

The impact of her work has helped students around the world pursue their dreams in STEM. She mentions a vivid encounter with a Bangladesh high school student who reached out to her personally and, without resources, he was unable to pursue his career in Engineering. Motivated by her desire to give back, she started a scholarship program in which she was able to donate $800 for the student to be able to pursue his career where he is now attending a University in China for a degree in Software Engineering. 

But, this mission is far from over. Poornima states that she is consistently looking for more students who will help advocate for this global mission. If you are interested in being a part of this mission, you should contact her directly on instagram @stemcorps. 

Her Advice

As a woman in STEM, first generation college student, and first in her family to navigate the complicated pathway of college, she advises other students to not be discouraged if your pathway is different from others. While we often have a timeline of the goals and when we want to achieve them, just because these goals don't meet these deadlines doesn’t mean that a certain pathway won’t work out. Opportunities to explore and fail can open up more doors and different pathways for students. Even if a pathway in STEM doesn’t work out, this isn’t a failure: sometimes failures can lead us to a better suited pathway. 

Looking at Poornima’s story from her past to the present, she ignited hope that STEM isn’t a straight cut pathway and can look very different for every individual. So whatever the goal is, Poornima shows how pioneering your own life is how to pioneering through STEM.