Tina Srivastava knows airplanes. She flies them, she’s jumped out of them, and in her senior year studying aeronautical and astronautical engineering, she tested satellite equipment in microgravity on a parabolic flight over the Gulf of Mexico. She has set her sights even higher, aiming to be an astronaut. But for now, her focus is on the emerging Internet of things.
Srivastava is the chief architect at Gigavation, a stealth-mode company cofounded by MIT and Harvard alumni that aims to secure the growing network of physical objects—like cars and homes—with “smart” capabilities. Take cars, for example. “A lot of studies show that there’s a dramatic benefit to passenger safety if cars could warn each other about upcoming hazards,” Srivastava explains. The problem, she says, is security: “You don’t want someone to hack into your brakes or your airbags.” Gigavation’s technology aims to protect automotive, medical, and defense networks, among other things. “It’s the MIT dream—working on a technology that can change the world,” she says.
As an undergraduate Srivastava served for four years on the Class Council, and as its social chair, she planned a skydiving excursion. She led a 40-person team through the process of designing, building, and testing a low-Earth-orbit satellite, a capstone project that landed her on that parabolic flight—and earned her the Lockheed Martin Prize for Excellence in Systems Engineering.
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