LiFT スカラーシップ

Trevor Sibanda, 21, Zimbabwe

Trevor is an employee at Golix, one of Africa’s leading active cryptocurrency exchanges, who enjoys contributing to open source projects. He plans to use his scholarship to enhance his skills and understanding of blockchain. In doing this, Trevor hopes to have a positive influence on Africa’s vision for blockchain and would like to contribute to a mainstream blockchain project in the near future.

Udah Vaghvani, 23, India

Udah is using blockchain technology to remove third-party verification authorities. In doing this, Udah wants to make multi-source verifications available under one network so all data is verified by the users — eliminating the need for further authentication. He has already created a skeleton of the application that will be used in this process, and with the LiFT scholarship Udah wants to advance his skill sets and move forward with completing this process.

Rachael Nelson, 37, United States

Rachael graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems from Texas Tech University.  She has a love for sharing, freedom and technology. While her goal was to major in computer science or electrical engineering, Rachael decided to take on a less demanding major so she could stay home and take care of her sick mother. Over the course of her career, Rachael has worked her way up from QA to network analyst. With this scholarship, Rachael wants to leverage open source technologies to help people in her community making it more affordable and adding protection to their freedoms and interests.

Oscar Villamizar, 38, Venezuela

Oscar is a student studying systems engineering at PSM Santiago Mariño. He has taken courses covering object-oriented programming, Domino, C/C++, Java and PHP. Oscar has developed a small application with the purpose of facilitating the calculation of poultry farm expenses. With this scholarship, Oscar plans to stay in Venezuela to develop technologies that can reach those who need it to encourage equity and accessibility.

Anna-Lena Marx, 23, Germany

Anna-Lena is a student working for a German company developing kernel drivers and fixing bugs in the Linux kernel and Android internal system. Her ultimate goal is to become a contributor to the mainline kernel and hopes to do so with the next few years.

Eric Curtin, 38, Ireland

To date, Eric has contributed to the Linux kernel twice and has particular interests in IPsec and Wiregaurd. Currently, he writes user space code. While he has been involved in several open source projects, Eric is specifically interested in kernel space code and getting more Irish contributors into the kernel community.

Jotham Chikuwe, 18, Zimbabwe

Jotham is a young boy from Zimbabwe who taught himself the basic terms of programming through the use of open source software such as Linux Operating System, PHP scripting language and Python programming language. He believes learning open source is vital to tap into the minds of the world’s best developers and plans to use this scholarship as a stepping stone to become one of the best developers.

Lauren Li, 17, United States

Lauren is a senior in high school with an extensive STEM background. She has used open source software in a multitude of biology projects. Additionally, she has researched viruses using SWISS-MODEL and Clustal Omega, applied SCHEMA for chimera library design, and developed her own open source software to predict protein disruptions. Lauren wants to use this scholarship to learn Linux without the financial burden. Ultimately, Lauren aspires to make contributions to cure and prevent human illnesses through science, technology and music.

Monica Limachi, 34, Bolivia

Monica is a freelance software engineer in Bolivia with three years of experience working in Linux. She feels it is important to democratize technology, but one must first learn about the technology first. With this scholarship, Monica wants to become a cloud specialist and plans to volunteer as a teacher exposing others to open source.

Paul Wechuli, 25, Kenya

Paul works at a research institute in Kenya developing end-to-end IoT systems. He has a degree in Telecommunications Engineering, but due to his interests shifting toward software development, he taught himself about web application development and cloud administration. He has had substantial exposure to open source software including, but not limited to, Node, Docker, Kubernetes and React. Paul plans to use his training and certification to aid in his goal of developing applications that will benefit people and businesses.

Feruzjon Muyassarov, 24, Finland

Feruzjon graduated from Tashkent University of Information Technology. He is currently in his second year of school attaining a master’s degree in sustainable technologies from the University de Lorraine and LUT. He continuously searches for courses that are dedicated to teaching SDN, OpenStack, virtualization technologies, networking and programming. Feruzjon believes the open source community is one of the best environments where all the experts can come together and share experience, discuss issues, help with deploying major and minor technologies as well as developing and advancing existing ones.

Maloto Nyirenda, 37, Malawi

Maloto is a network manager for Malawi Telecommunications Limited. He has a solid foundation in Linux systems through obtaining a certificate in Linux Administration, but believes he needs to further his training in order to sharpen his capabilities within his career field. With this scholarship, Maloto plans to explore new Linux technologies and deploy them so users in Malawi can enjoy the maximum amount of services offered.

Onyeibo Oku, 43, Nigeria

Onyeibo manages an e-laboratory in the Department of Architecture at Enugu State University of Science and Technology in Nigeria. He feels that open source training and certification will make his inputs more convincing to his peers and to their ICT Department. Additionally, Onyeibo feels further training will make it easier to convince the institution to consider open source tools for administrative and public relations tasks. He wants to expose open source to other Nigerians who may not have access due to poor infrastructure and economy and believes this scholarship will help him do so.

Deepak Neupane, 36, Nepal

Deepak wants to use to use this scholarship as a means to provide easier access to medical care in the rural areas of Nepal. Initially beginning his career as a Microsoft system engineer, Deepak shifted his focus to open source five years ago and now feels acquiring training and certification in open source will make him an asset to his organization, rural area and his personal career.

Rae Becerra, 36, United Stated

Rae is the Senior Network Engineer at the Museum of Science in Boston. She has utilized open source to support public education and nonprofits. She believes that having the flexibility to implement a solution without an excess financial burden is critical in keeping organizations up-to-date and operational, especially in education, when funding is not always available.

Xheni Myrtaj, 24, Albania

Xheni has a Bachelor’s degree in business information and a MS in information security. She has used open source software for years and just began developing last year while contributing to Nextcloud. Xheni wants to use this scholarship to jump start her training for a career in security and desires to bring more women into utilizing open source.