Jane Chen, a 2007–08 Selected Professions Fellow, worked with a team of public policy, business, and engineering students on creating an infant incubator that would cost less than 1 percent of what such incubators currently cost—as much as $20,000 in the United States. She and her team were able to do better than that. They created an incubator for $25.

Melissa Harris-Perry, Ph.D., a 2001–02 American Fellow, is the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forest University, where she is also the founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Center and the executive director of the Pro Humanitate Institute. Harris-Perry is an editor-at-large for ELLE.com and the founder of the Collaborative to Advance Equity Through Research, which brings institutions and people together to support and improve research about women and girls of color. She hosted the award-winning television show Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC from 2012 to 2016 and is the author of two award-winning books: Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought and Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women. Harris-Perry received AAUW’s inaugural 2013 Alumnae Recognition Award and was the keynote speaker at AAUW’s 2017 National Conference for College Women Student Leaders.

Watch Melissa Harris Perry talk about the importance of her AAUW Fellowship.