User:Aikhtam/sandbox

Laila Alawa (born in 1991) is a media and technology entrepreneur, researcher, and the founder and CEO of The Tempest, an Internet media company created by and for diverse millennial women.

Early life and education
Alawa's father is Syrian and her mother is half Syrian, half Danish. She is the eldest of 8 children. Alawa was born in Denmark but lived for several years in Japan, where her father studied engineering.

She immigrated to the United States when she was six, grew up in New York, and lived in New Hampshire for over seven years in the mid-2000s. She was homeschooled from the second grade because children in her class had found out her mother was Muslim. She became an American citizen in 2015, one year after her parents.

At the age of 16, Alawa entered Wellesley College, where she graduated with a degree in psychology and education studies in 2012. During her time at Wellesley, she worked on research initiatives examining female leadership in the sciences, minority stereotyping, and consumer behaviorism.

She worked as a research specialist at Princeton University, studying socio-cognitive processing under the framework of community, identity and belonging.

Career
Feeling that she and other diverse millennial women were not represented by mainstream media, Alawa founded The Tempest in 2016. While originally focused on personal essays and editorials exploring gender and ethnic equality, the media company began incorporating perspectives of 1200 thought leaders from 90 countries, including subjects such as the cultural stigma of abortion and university protests against Richard B. Spencer. The Tempest began its first podcast, a show called The Exposé. The Tempest launched internationally at South by Southwest in March 2016.

During 2016, Alawa ran The Tempest on a budget procured from a successful crowdfunding campaign, before running the first investment round for the company. She managed a Washington-based team for Voxe, a French NGO that created a system for comparing the platforms of political candidates to help voters, which was hosted on The Tempest. The Tempest grew from 500,000 hits per month in 2015 to several million unique visitors per month in 2017. The company now offers not only user-generated content, but also original video, audio and podcasts. It has offices in the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

Personal attacks
In 2016, Alawa was part of a United States Department of Homeland Security subcommittee that helped brainstorm solutions for a report titled Countering Violent Extremism. She was selected as a member because of her perspective as a Syrian American Muslim woman of the millennial generation. When the report was published, Alawa was the subject of an article on conservative website The Daily Caller, titled "Syrian immigrant who said 9/11 'changed the world for good' is a homeland security advisor." It used some of Alawa's tweets to support the claim, including one in which she wrote "9/11 changed the world for good." Alawa explained that she meant "for good" as in "forever." The article was followed by thousands of hateful tweets, threatening her life and mocking her looks and religion, as well as articles in Breitbart News and other blogs. The next day, Alawa was given a separate entry on Snopes.com, the fact-checking website.

Awards and recognition
Alawa was recognized in Forbes 30 Under 30 for 2018.

She was named an Ariane de Rothschild Fellow in 2015.