#SoCaltech: Sara Beery

“I wanted to be a ballerina. That was my true love. I started training five hours a day when I was 12. I got my first professional ballet job at 16, and I moved across the country to Atlanta to dance for the Atlanta Ballet. I loved it. It was an amazing opportunity for me. It's hard to work as a ballerina in this country. I felt so lucky to be doing it, but ballerinas don't get paid very well. I was pretty broke and pretty hungry. Georgia Tech was just around the corner, and they had scientific seminars where they would encourage students to come by providing free food, so I started going to Georgia Tech and sitting in and listening to the science. I had never had anyone sit me down and tell me, ‘You should consider science as a career.’ I thought engineers drove trains. I thought computer science was for boys who liked video games. But I started going to these scientific talks and it was the first time that I saw that science could actually be a tool to help people and help fight some of these huge societal problems we're facing, things like climate change, sustainability challenges, and mitigating biodiversity loss. That really opened my eyes. I started to see a degree in technology as a tool to really make a difference on things that really mattered to me intrinsically. So after six years of professional ballet, I retired young and went back to school. Now I work to build computer vision systems that can monitor biodiversity at a global scale, across the taxonomic tree.”

Sara Beery is a graduate student studying computer vision in the laboratory of Pietro Perona. Her research focuses on technology-based approaches to conservation and sustainability challenges, such as the use of artificial intelligence to augment the monitoring of elephant populations in the wild. She received a double bachelor of science in electrical engineering and mathematics with a computers science minor from Seattle University in 2016.

#SoCaltech is an occasional series celebrating the diverse individuals who give Caltech its spirit of excellence, ambition, and ingenuity. Know someone we should profile? Send nominations to magazine@caltech.edu.