User:Zakgreant/Léa Steinacker

Léa Steinacker (born 1989 ) is a German journalist, academic, and entrepreneur whose work focuses on how technology interacts with people, organizations, and the planet. Artificial intelligence, AI ethics, feminism and social justice are key themes within her work and she frequently writes, presents, and interviews others on these topics. Some prominent interviewees have included digital activist Joy Buolamwini, writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Early life
Steinacker grew up in Walsrode, Germany. She excelled academically, skipping the sixth grade and winning the Lower Saxony state prize for English in 2003. She was active in sports, playing tennis as part of a Walsroder team competing nationally for a position in the German Jugend trainiert für Olympia program.

Education
In 2007, steinacker completed her International Baccalaureate at UWC Atlantic. Selected from 400 German applicants to the program, her attendance was partially funded by the Walsrode Rotary Club.

In 2011, she Princeton University awarded her with a Bachelor of Arts with honors in International Affairs and a minor in African Studies. Her senior thesis, "An ecological approach to the risks of female sex workers in rural Kenya," was supervised by Elizabeth Levy Paluck. Her studies at Princeton were supported by the Davis United World College Scholars Program, where she was a class of 2011 scholar and included a year at The American University in Cairo where she was named an Adel Mahmoud Global Health Scholar.

2013–2015
Steinacker earned a Master of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and was a McCloy Fellow (German). She also participated in the first White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism on the recommendation of Farah Pandith.

2017-2022
She was completed her PhD at the University of St. Gallen. Her doctoral thesis, "Code Capital: A Sociotechnical Framework to Understand the Implications of Artificially Intelligent Systems from Design to Deployment," was advised by Prof. Dr. Damian Borth and Prof. Dr. Veronica Barassi.

Career
During her time at Princeton, Steinacker interned at a Hanover radio station reporting on political news.

In the early 2010s, she focused on humanitarian and social justice work with NGOs in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo and provided first-person reports for the Walsroder Zeitung before being evacuated from Bukavu during the M23 rebellion.

After her studies at Harvard, in 2015 she joined the Handelsblatt Media Group as a Digital Scout for German business magazine WirtschaftsWoche, eventually becoming the Chief Innovation Officer of WirtschaftsWoche in 2017.

In 2018, WirtschaftsWoche created an online magazine called ada, with Steinacker assuming the role of "Chief Strategy Officer, ada".

In July of 2020, ada Learning GmbH was formally established, with Steinacker and Miriam Meckel as Managing Directors and with Steinacker assuming the role of Founder and Chief Innovation Officer.

Honors and awards

 * In 2011, Steinacker won the Henry Richardson Labouisse Prize, an award of "$25,000 to each recipient to support research in developing countries by graduating seniors who intend to pursue a career devoted to problems of development and modernization."


 * In 2016, she was named an de:Atlantik-Brücke Young Leader.


 * In 2018, she was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 for Europe in the category of Media and Marketing for helping to bring one of Germany's leading business magazines into the 21st century.


 * Also in 2018, Medium Magazin, a German trade magazine for journalists, named her as one of their Top 30 Under 30 journalists.