Many must have discouraged her, mocked her or tried to stop her from achieving her dreams, but 27-year-old Gloria who is just getting started, persevered against all odds until she bagged her self a doctorate degree. Dr Gloria Opoku-Boateng Osardu, a US-based Ghanaian is a PhD Research Scientist at Northrop Grumman, a leading global aerospace and security company in the United States of America. She is a Senior User Experience (UX) Research Scientist who does abstract research and design on concepts and theories that have not yet been implemented or applied. 27-year-old Dr Gloria Osardu recently made her PhD in Information Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) with a dissertation research investigating brain fitness games as an intervention for the age-related cognitive decline in healthy older adults. In a more simple term, Dr Gloria Osardu’s research is centred on helping aged people not to “think like babies” as they are often believed to do. A rare feat yes, but the US-based Ghanaian strived to make herself one of the very few to achieve it.
For achieving such great feat at such a young age, Gloria was interviewed by Techpreneur Magazine on how she managed all the challenges that come with being a User Experience Research scientist (UX). Gloria said she got motivated to choose UX when she was accepted into Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s Applied Health Informatics program, where she studied the current state of Health IT in America, concerns, standards and federal regulations surrounding Health IT in America. Towards the second year of her master’s degree, she was accepted into graduate school to work on an interdisciplinary PhD program where she could combine Human-Computer Interaction with Health IT. From First Degree Having started and completed her high school and college degrees from Aggrey Memorial (AME Zion) and Valley View University in Ghana respectively, Gloria first became passionate about taking a course in Health Informatics after she attended a talk on the topic by a German speaker. She proceeded to further her education in the US after completing her first degree at Valley View University. She came from a family which upholds excellence and hard work in academics. Gloria who has a vast interest in technology and research worked with the likes of IBM, Google and other high profile tech companies as a User Experience (UX) Research Scientist. University of Maryland, Baltimore County UMBC Throughout her time at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), Dr Opoku-Boateng received scholarships and grants from IBM, Google, LinkedIn, and Xerox, and participated in several conferences. This included the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing, Healthcare Information, and Management Systems Society conference, AMIA conference for informatics professionals, engineering-focused Global Students Forum, and Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology. See Also: Kwesi Appiah’s Solar Factory: 5 Things Ghanaians Must Know Growing Up Dr Gloria Osardu grew up as a middle child of three girls as every other girl who had no idea of what they wanted to become but for Gloria, she also had it at the back of her mind to take up a career that was challenging, requiring minimal interaction with people, yet full of fun. Her parents played vital roles too in shaping her. Dr Gloria Osardu and her sisters were encouraged to pursue college/grad school degrees and careers that fit their personality and choices. The 27-year-old hopes to hold management position where she can combine her technical work with the managerial aspect. Gloria’s father is a Pastor and a Theologian while her mother is a Human Resource Executive, and they both do not have a biased idea about sciences or arts. Most of it all is her mother who seemed like an unseen force pushing her three girls to pursue the career of their dreams while playing the role of a career psychologist, ensuring that they were thriving in the paths we had chosen. Gloria’s mother married her father and had already had her three children before attending college and receiving her MBA. Both parents gave in their best to ensure that Gloria and her siblings all have advanced graduate degrees in computer science.
