Shawna Young
Interim CEO, Ada Developers Academy
Co-Founder, Black Computer Science Network (BCSN)
Shawna Young is a passionate educator who most recently worked at Scratch, the world’s largest and most diverse coding community for kids, as executive director in 2020 after serving as the executive director of the Duke University Talent Identification Program (Duke TIP).
At Duke TIP, she directed one of the largest academic talent searches, with over 450,000 K-12 students and over 3 million alumni. During COVID-19, Young transitioned the $35M+ non-profit organization, anchored in providing academically rigorous summer residential programs, to primarily serving its students and families online and developing new outreach methods to increase the diversity of students in its talent search. Prior to Duke TIP, Young spearheaded the expansion the Office of Engineering Outreach Programs (OEOP) at MIT, serving as the executive director for eight years.