Abbie Maemoto

High School Graduation Year: 2021
Year First Awarded the Carson Scholarship, School: 2020, Palos Verdes High School
Sponsored by: The Eleni and Wolfgang Gagon Trust

As a young girl, Abbie desired to conduct hands-on research in a lab but found that the cost of such opportunities was prohibitive for her family.  After finally securing a research opportunity through cold emails and the support of a mentor, Abbie’s passion for improving access to immersive experiences for under-resourced students was ignited. She self-published a children’s book and used the proceeds from its sales to provide scholarships for 12 low-income students to attend a local research program.  For the last two years, Abbie has worked alongside two other co-founders to build a robotics startup venture, Dalus AI, from the ground-up.  This venture aims to help robotics engineers build safer and more reliable robots by building a testing platform that automates the robotics testing pipeline end-to-end using specialized AI models.  Accessibility and equity drive her career goals as a product manager (PM).  She hopes to create accessible products and experiences which maximize the balance between providing business value and serving the needs of disadvantaged users.  She has been named a Bessemer Fellowship Finalist and currently serves as a PM for the nonprofit Develop for Good, where she is spearheading initiatives to increase access to the arts for students in underserved communities. Abbie does all of this while also pursuing her bachelor’s degree in computer science and product design, with a minor in biology, at Stanford University.