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Coverage of the 2025 GeekWire Awards, presented by Astound Business Solutions , the PNW’s annual startup and technology awards.Fatima Kamal, an education program supervisor at the Pacific Science Center, works on digital content. (PacSci Photo)The COVID pandemic in 2020 shuttered school classrooms and extracurricular activities, but kids’ brains were plenty active, leaving teachers and parents scrambling to find educational resources.Fatima Kamal, an education program supervisor at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center, quickly stepped up to help fill the void.“The response was trying to think about what we could do to continue serving our community,” Kamal recalled. That included launching PacSci’s digital learning programming, she said, “which at the time, didn’t have a name, didn’t have a department. We didn’t really have any structure … it was a lot of just testing and trying out ideas.”For her STEM education leadership and impact, Kamal is one of two instructors being celebrated at this year’s GeekWire Awards as STEM Educator of the Year. The second honoree is Scott McComb, an instructor at Raisbeck High School, who was separately featured on GeekWire.First Tech is sponsoring the award, and Kamal and McComb will be recognized at the GeekWire Awards event April 30 at Seattle’s Showbox SoDo.The nonprofit PacSci, which welcomes about 400,000 in-person guests annually, rapidly created online content during COVID for desperate families and educators while also navigating big layoffs. It launched the Curiosity at Home site that includes videos on topics including the science behind baking chocolate chip cookies and an explosive demo with liquid nitrogen.PacSci’s “digital learning really came out of that closure and that need to innovate,” Kamal said.In addition to helping create PacSci’s online educational content, Kamal supervises the Digital Learning Studio, which offers interactive, remote workshops for more than 10,000 students each year, and she helped establish a permanent, professional AV studio for PacSci

Coverage of the 2025 GeekWire Awards, presented by Astound Business Solutions , the PNW’s annual startup and technology awards.Science teacher Scott McComb with students at Raisbeck Aviation High School. (Raisbeck Aviation Photo)Of all their inquiries, there’s one question the students at Raisbeck Aviation High School never ask science teacher Scott McComb. And that is, “When am I going to use this in real life?”“It’s been 20 years since someone’s asked me that question,” McComb said.That’s because McComb’s project-based program is focused on real-world applications where students do experiments and interact with industry experts.“The idea is, how do we connect the work that’s happening inside the classroom with work that’s happening outside the classroom?” he said. “And so we blur the line.”For his trailblazing approach, McComb is one of two instructors being celebrated at this year’s GeekWire Awards as a STEM Educator of the Year. The second honoree is Fatima Kamal, an education program supervisor at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center, who will be separately featured on GeekWire.First Tech is sponsoring the award, and Kamal and McComb will be recognized at the GeekWire Awards event on April 30 at Seattle’s Showbox SoDo.Back in the classroom, McComb’s ninth-grade students are asked to design and build a heat shield to protect a chocolate bunny from the super hot temperatures produced when a spacecraft reenters the Earth’s atmosphere. The project culminates in presentations to thermodynamicists from companies such as Boeing, Blue Origin and Space X.“Instead of just turning in a piece of paper at the end, or a worksheet, they have a design file, and they present it to practicing engineers who say, ‘So, tell me a little about that,” McComb said

The 2025 GeekWire Awards Geeks Give Back honorees, from left: Chaitra Vedullapalli, Aviel Ginzburg and Emer Dooley.Being part of a community is what the GeekWire Awards are all about — the chance to come together to celebrate Pacific Northwest tech innovators and entrepreneurs and their successes over the past year.The honorees in the Geeks Give Back category are part of the reason there is a community, especially one that helps to make space for more people in tech, to help turn ideas into startups, and to continually work to strengthen the ecosystem that makes everything thrive.The recipients this year are Aviel Ginzburg, the entrepreneur and investor who is a general partner at VC firm Founder’s Co-Op and who helped create Foundations, a new community for tech founders in Seattle; Chaitra Vedullapalli, founder and president of Women in Cloud, which helps women-led businesses get resources to succeed in cloud computing; and Emer Dooley, site lead for the Creative Destruction Lab at the University of Washington, a nonprofit that runs startup accelerators across the world.The Geeks Give Back category is presented by BECU.The GeekWire Awards will recognize nearly 50 finalists and honorees across a dozen categories, from Startup of the Year to Next Tech Titan. Winners will receive their coveted robot trophies live onstage on April 30 at Showbox SoDO in Seattle. Individual tickets are now on sale. Grab a seat here!Keep reading to hear from this year’s Geeks Give Back honorees in their own words about how to build and sustain successful communities. Responses edited for brevity and clarity.FoundationsAviel Ginzburg. (Founders’ Co-op Photo). “From my perspective, you don’t build community, you nurture it