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By the Summer of 2020, right when covid had made almost all parts of the world be in lockdown, I finished my PhD, and I decided to come back home, to Murcia, in the South of Spain. I needed a break after such a massive personal and professional experience that the PhD was, as well as the massive unsettling pandemic that had arrived. So I decided to stop for a while and take a gap year (I had never done this before). Yes, I started working as the Managing Editor of Robohub, but that was only a few hours a week, so still, it could be a gap year. Before, I've told you that half-way through my PhD I felt the call to explore other human aspects and I did that by going outside the lab to engage with other human beings.

You immigrate to a new country that speaks a different language, and start work with some of the brightest engineers in the world. Now, you're leading teams of people who are 10 or 20 years older than you, working on one of the fastest growing internet companies of the last decade. You have two options: sink or swim. That's the position Simon Eskildsen found himself in early in his career. He left his home in Denmark after high school, and moved to Canada alone to take a pre-college gap year working at Shopify. When he started, Shopify had 150 employees supporting tens of thousands of merchants. Now, it has 5,000 employees and over a million merchants.

How much can a 17-year-old boy really know about women? For starters, that thousands face heartbreaking and costly misdiagnosed breast cancer scares every year. Abu Qader, who's about to start his final year in the Chicago public school system's Lane Technical College Prep High School, was born in war-scarred Afghanistan but has spent most of his 17 years on Earth in the U.S. Qader and European business partner Vedad Mesanovic, who focuses on young and under-resourced scientists, created a company they call GliaLab (named after the cells that support and protect neurons). They are now courting venture capitalists for a targeted 600,000 to help finance the breast cancer-focused artificial intelligence that Qader first created for a 10th-grade class project. Qader believes his technology can help women (and men, too) take on potentially deadly breast tumors and non-cancerous growths by using the convenience of their own mobile phone or tablet to aid in diagnosis and classification, reduce human error and save the expense of false-positive readings.