The Bobby Bones Show - Episode 7: The Unlikely Journey of a Civic-Minded Tech Ninja

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

Afua Bruce's career in data science and technology is dotted with a bunch of impressive acronyms: IBM, the FBI (!), even working for the POTUS (Obama) as Executive Director of the National Science and Technology Council. Now, she's taken on a new challenge as Chief Program Officer for Datakind, a global non-profit that harnesses the power of data science and AI in the service of humanity. Heck, she even has her own statue as part of the #IfThenSheCan women in STEM initiative (https://ifthenshecan.org). Tune in to hear an amazing story of a truly unique life path. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This season, we're bringing you stories of folks following their passion to carve their own career path. In a digital age, software engineers and data scientists are the unsung heroes that make all of our convenient technology possible. And while they dedicate their careers to making all of our lives easier, they often go unnoticed. Well, today, we talk to a standout techie whose love for science took her from jobs and computers. to government agencies to working with nonprofits on the front lines of the pandemic today. As someone who admittedly thinks that Roombas and Siri will take over the world at some point, it was pretty reassuring to hear that our interviewie today is not on team Robapocalypse. Absolutely. My goal is certainly to leverage data science and AI in service of humanity.

This is Afua. It's Afua Bruce. I am the chief program officer at Datakind, and I'm based just a outside of the DC area. Afua is a wildly talented software engineer with a pretty fascinating work history. She's currently in a more managerial role at Datakind, a non-profit organization that connects other organizations in the social sector with technology and scientists that can help them do their jobs more efficiently. So, Datakind has been partnering with a couple of different organizations and a couple of

different African countries on frontline health systems. Frontline health systems. Basically, you know when you go to the doctor and you've got to fill out tons and tons of information every time explaining your medical history or past doctors you've seen? Well, that process really bogs down frontline health workers. At least over 50% of frontline health workers' time is spent accessing and updating patient records instead of caring for patients. And so if you can look at how do we improve the data integrity of these systems, you can then let frontline health workers do the things they want to do, which is to care for patients and the things that. are most trained for. Right.

So this is what a lot of Dutokine's work has been in. I mean, your job essentially right now is to make other people's jobs easier. Yeah, you could sum it up that way. That's the goal. Right now, her projects are in a few African countries and in India. Basically, she's making the records that doctors and nurses and volunteers need more accessible. The fact that frontline workers spend over 50% of their time on this stuff was really surprising to me.

I got to believe that it's not what a lot of doctors are thinking about when they make a huge commitment to go to medical school. I would say it's probably not high on the priority list, really making sure you understand how to fill out different technical systems, how you enter data in systems, and how you track that data. People often go to medical school to be able to practice medicine. These projects are only a couple years old, so she's getting to see them work in the field for the first time right now.

But already, organizations that use their data systems and software have seen it drastically shave off the time workers are spending looking through those records. So you can take people who are doing that, apply them to other things that need to be done. Instead, it also means that people who are looking at that data to make decisions about what type of care is best, what type of care should we recommend here. What are trends that we're seeing here? What should we be changing and how should we be, reacting based on accurate data of what actually happened.

So in the way that the best technology knows what you need and provides it for you, maybe even before you know you need it, data kind systems are meant to be fluid, intelligent tools that substantially cut down on the menial tasks that frontline workers are currently burdened with. And so this means that people can go back to providing care to the people who need care rather than looking at the streams of data that are that's coming in. Afua plays it cool, but her work has massive implications that are directly aimed at how our health system works all over the world. It's huge. But to back up, it all started off when she was a young kid who just liked numbers.

Growing up, my favorite subject was always math. I always really loved computers. I loved playing games on computers. I love video games. I remember my dad buying me, you know, remote control cars and figuring out those were a lot of fun. She moved around a lot as a kid. She lived in about nine states. She was into dance and tennis.

But even at a young age, she was really into volunteering and did a lot of social work. Now makes sense to me on this side of it, that I would find myself in a career that lets me figure out how to use technology to support communities. Foo is a first generation American. Both her parents are from Ghana. And the mentality in her household growing up instilled the importance of helping out early on. Just I think the focus on community and the focus on the people around you and really making sure that you're taking care of not just yourself, which is important, but also your meeting needs that you can where possible. She went out to study computer engineering at Purdue in Indiana. And while she was there, she started working for IBM as a student.

IBM hired her full time as a software engineer right out of school, and she loved it. I really liked being an engineer. I really liked coding. I really like the different, the software that we were building, worked on some of IBM's large servers. I enjoyed IBM's culture. I really enjoyed the work. Already having an impressive start to her career,

she actually decided to take a leave of absence from IBM, going back to school at University of Michigan for an MBA. And she fully planned on going back to IBM with her newly acquired business degree. But while she was on campus, she got recruited as a special advisor for the FBI. Yeah. And so I made an unexpected to everyone shift from IBM to the FBI. And that was really the start for myself of really seeing how my tech skills could really think more focused in the public interest, working in government and working in the nonprofit sector.

So when people asked you what you did at that point and you said, I work for the FBI. It absolutely felt great to say that I worked for the FBI. It's really cool to say. It was definitely cool to say my name is Afoe Bruce and I'm here representing the FBI. She worked a lot of strategy and program management positions there in the science and technology branch. And she got to work on a lot of the tech that the FBI uses. Really got to see how tech can support what agents do. What do you mean like Q, James Bond kind of stuff?

Yes. In fact, my boss at the time. would describe the division as Q. That's where all the fun toys were built and tested. And so it's really cool. Did you get to like work on stuff that you can't talk about? I think inherently part of what the FBI does is things that you can't talk about. However, she did get to see some of the stuff she was working on get notoriety in upper management and even on the news.

Things like her work on forensics technology, improving fingerprint, tech and systems for gun background checks. It was certainly easy to feel a part of something bigger when, you know, that a lot of the work that you do really matters. It was important to keep American safe. It was important to keep community safe. It was important to keep families safe. It was important to keep children safe.

Just goes to show you. You can be a cool government crime fighter, even if you don't carry a badge and a gun. People used to ask a foo if she carried one all the time. And I always quote one of my good. colleagues and a fellow special advisor, he used to say that our weapons were excel in PowerPoint. So while the job does sound very exciting, sometimes it really does boil down to simple tools and to a simple understanding and really figuring out how you can leverage your skill set to really help move a mission forward. That's exactly what an undercover agent would say.

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She served as the executive director of the White House's National Science and Technology Council, basically overseeing a massive think tank with tons of committees and experts that convene and come up with plans for how we as a country can use science and tech to our benefit. There are a lot of experts throughout the federal government who have spent a lot of time and energy educating

and being educated on and getting smart on and working on both policy and technology development on a lot of different areas. And so being able to just create an environment where you can convene true expertise and then produce something that can really guide future investments in future work is pretty awesome. At this point, she really wanted to get back to working with on-the-ground technical projects, which is how she found herself at Data Kind, where she is now. It really allows me the opportunity to combine my data knowledge, my technology knowledge, in really passion for working directly with communities and working directly with nonprofits.

So now, she's back to what she started off wanting to do, using data science to make people's lives easier, which is something we all use every day and speaking personally, take for granted. You can yell at Siri to order you a pizza and 30 minutes later, you get a pizza. Software engineers make that happen. I appreciate data science sometimes for being able to log, in to whatever shopping platform I'm using at the time and being suggested items that just happened to be what I want to see and what I want to wear. Customized options presented to me and my life made easier by data science that's run in the background. Yeah, I mean, I love that too. And yeah, the technology is, I don't even, I don't get how it works. It's like magic. It's

crazy how advanced it is. And then for that kind of tech to exist and for you to be working on a project at Datakind like making record systems more accessible for frontline workers. Yeah. Like that's kind of crazy, right? Yeah. Yeah. One of the Data Kind co-founders used to say, I'm actually not sure if it's his quote, if we got it from someone else, but he used to say, the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed, which is something that really resonates for me because, you know, so many times we have these technology systems, to your point, just we don't even question them anymore, we don't even think about them. But in some sectors, it just hasn't been adopted yet. Technology often mirrors what our priorities are as a society.

They can be inspiring and also pretty upsetting at the same time. Like back in 1969, we put humans on the moon. And at the same time, back on Earth, cities all over the country didn't have clean water systems or roads that work and still don't today. I can yell at Siri to get me a pizza in 30 minutes and a frontline worker during COVID might have to spend hours and hours on the phone tracking down a patient's medical history so that they know what they can or can't safely treat them with. You know, I joined data kind because social sector organizations who are out there saving lives, trying to give people access to health care, give people access to housing, give people access to food, don't always have the time to invest in data systems or technology systems.

And so ways that Datakine can really partner with those organizations to help them do their mission more effectively, incredibly important work. Afua joined Data Kind right before the pandemic hit. And she was hearing from organizations that were using Datakine systems about how much they helped with the crisis. Organizations like Plentiful, an app that makes it easier for individuals and families to get food from food pantries. And so hearing that kind of feedback from an organization like Plentiful or other organizations, you know, that will say the work you did helps us save, you know, the time our drivers are out by 15% or something like that and really refocus their efforts on again, executing on their mission, which is why people who join nonprofits, join nonprofits is just really, that's just really great to hear. Again, Afu's demeanor, I feel like it doesn't match the gravity of the work that she's done. But that's because she's really humble. From IBM to the FBI to the White House to her work with Datakine that could have massive implications around the world,

the work that she's doing and has done is monumental. And it's not flying under the radar. In 2019, she was asked to be an ambassador for the if-then initiative. The tagline being, if we support a woman in STEM, then she can change the world. About 120 women were selected from all different. in science, technology, engineering, math professions. And the goal of the If Then Initiative is to highlight women in STEM so that girls get excited about pursuing STEM careers someday.

One of the things that the If Then initiative did was take 3D scans of all the ambassadors. And a week before our interview, Afua flew down to Dallas, Texas to see an exhibit they put up, a grassy field filled with bright orange statues. There are about 122 life-sized statues of women in STEM, one of them being me. You have a statue? I do have a statue. What? Really flattering and really humbling and really exciting.

How did that feel seeing a statue of yourself? Yeah, it was surreal. Walking around the statue exhibit, looking for myself, and then just, you know, seeing a life-size me, holding my My laptop by my side was pretty incredible. I had the opportunity to see it for the first time with my family, watching my sisters take a selfie with my statue also really surreal. Talking with the Fua, you probably wouldn't guess this is a person who has a statue made of her. Not because she shouldn't,

but because we often dedicate statues to people who are the face of a cause or at the front of a historic event. And when we make statues of people, it's because we want them to be idolized. They are figures we choose to literally look up to. It makes me pretty happy that as a society, we're choosing more and more to look up to people like Afua. Smart, humble people working intelligently and diligently every day to make all of our lives easier. People whose weapons are Excel and PowerPoint. It must have felt so cool to be recognized in that.

that way with a bunch of other people who are behind the scenes in a way that most people would never know about them if they weren't orange statues in Dallas, Texas, right? I can honestly say that I never imagined saying myself as a statue. Having an opportunity to be recognized, you know, certainly selfishly makes me feel great. But again, I'm really hoping that, you know, someone will read the description of what I do and the little, plaque that's there next to my statue and think, oh, I could also think of ways to use science and technology to strengthen communities. That's great for this person who's a statue, but it's something I could do too. For On the Job, I'm Otis Gray. Thanks for listening to On the Job,

brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. This season of On the Job is produced by Audiation. The episodes were written and produced by me, Otis Gray. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallins. The show is mixed by Matt Noble for Audiation Studios at the loft in Bronxville, New York. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Find us on IHeart Radio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard, please consider rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time for more inspiring stories about discovering your life's work. All right, if you have ever dealt with a traditional home security company, you know the drill.

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