Yen Nguyen Siow
Ms Yen Siow completed both her Master of Teaching and Bachelor of Commerce degrees at Monash University.
From 2007 to 2015, Ms Siow worked at Swinburne University of Technology as the Business Development and Special Projects Coordinator for Digital Frontiers under Swinburne Research and the Faculty of Information Communication Technology. She has worked in various positions as a Social Entrepreneur, STEM Teacher with the United Nations women in STEM (Singapore), as a Humanitarian Ambassador and Foundations Scholarship Manager for Caulfield Grammar School to support humanitarian and Indigenous scholarship students, and as the Digital Literacy Manager for the Father Bob Maguire Foundation (supporting low socio-economic communities who face barriers to accessing education and technology).
In the past eight years, Ms Siow has focused her attention on building opportunities for communities that are displaced by conflict to further their education with outreach projects in STEAM education through SMART Osvita (a Ukraine and Canadian partnered NGO with Monash University), with Cahaya Surya Bakti School (Education for Rohingya refugees) and Opening Universities for Refugees (OUR).
Ms Yen is passionate about providing equal access and opportunity for students to learn STEAM subjects in a hands-on fun way and works with special needs children, refugee children, women and children affected by domestic violence and Indigenous communities.
One of the most innovative projects Ms Siow has worked on was the RoboBus project where she retrofitted an old bus to transform it into a mobile STEM classroom. The bus was driven to various schools and community centres as an outreach education project, impacting over 2000 people in Melbourne for STEM education.
As the Founder of the Social Enterprise “Discovering without Borders”, Ms Siow has been providing online and in person workshops for a range of communities in Southeast Asia, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Australia.
Her work has been recognised at the 50 years anniversary celebrations by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore and at Facebook now Meta headquarters in Singapore.
She was also the co-founder of Technology without Borders with Swinburne University – an Australian student driven group that looks to improve access and understanding by serving the greater community through technology.