When Rediet Abebe, M.S. ’18, Ph.D. ’19, came to the United States from her native Ethiopia, she was surprised to find such drastic inequality.

“At least in Ethiopia, we were sort of resource constrained – I could see why it was that way,” she said. “But here, it just didn’t make any sense to me.”

Around the same time, she began to discover the powerful impact algorithms could have on people’s lives. At Cornell, her doctoral program in computer science allowed her to merge her math degrees with her interest in inequality and social impact.