Ketevani Kvirikashvili completed her Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering at San Diego State University in Tbilisi, Georgia. During her studies, she worked as a business intelligence intern at Georgian Industrial Group (GIG) for nine months. Afterwards she worked for one year as an intern in the IT department of TBC bank in Georgia. After graduation, Keti applied for a Master’s program in software engineering at the University of Tartu. She was accepted and received a tuition-waiver scholarship. The university’s academic reputation, teaching methods, scholarships, and working opportunities after graduation made her realize that it was the best choice for her education. After the first semester of studies she had to choose between specialized skills in two major software application domains: enterprise systems and embedded real-time systems. She chose enterprise systems. During the semester she had a chance to participate in several hackathons and programs, such as BioInnovation Days and the STARTERtartu program. During the program, Keti and her team were chosen to travel to the Medical University of Łódź in Poland to present their ideas to local experts at the “Forge of Talents” competition. They were also contacted by a reporter and the team’s interview was published in Lufthansa’s magazine that was issued in January 2020.

Mariam received her B.S. from San Diego State-Georgia with Sum Cum Laude. She is currently a Joint Doctoral Program student in Organic Chemistry at UCSD-SDSU. She takes classes at UCSD and works as a Research Assistant in Dr. Gustafson`s laboratory. She is also working as a Teaching Assistant for Chemistry courses. Her research interest primarily focuses on optimization of selective kinase inhibitors. Currently, she is working on obtaining asymmetric methodology for BTK kinase inhibitor synthesis and synthesis of Proteolysis Targeting Chimeras.

Luka Lomtadze spent the first two years of university in Georgia, during which time he became the president of engineering schools, worked for ten different companies and government organizations, started multiple start-ups and made up his mind to take on new challenges on the main campus for the following semester. As a result, after his junior year, Luka got a summer software engineering internship at Facebook, and by the end of the summer he had gotten offers from Google and Facebook to join them as a full-time software engineer after graduation. Currently, Luka works at Google on the Android OS team developing amazing features for the world’s most widespread mobile platform, used by more than two billion people.

Davit Soselia currently attends KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. His time is spent mainly between courses, research, and consulting. The courses are highly rigorous. The university operates on a schedule of four periods per year, making the experience pretty intense. He has also been involved in various research projects both in theoretical and applied machine learning. For consulting, Davit works with a few companies internationally. In Sweden, the choices are mainly interest-driven for him, based on which subfield he wants to deepen his experience in.

Nino Grigalashvili is an alumnus of San Diego State University Georgia’s class of 2019. She holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering. After graduation, she was employed by an international Israeli IT company, Webiz, located in Tbilisi, Georgia. She has been a member of this friendly work environment for about a year, and has had the ability to work with the latest technologies. Nino and her team have worked on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. As a front-end developer, she has developed skills in React.js, JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3. While she was graduating from SDSU in the spring of 2019, Nino won the “Best Innovator of Georgia” competition, which was funded by the Italian Embassy in cooperation with GITA and the COTEC Foundation. As a prize, she won a three-month internship at one of the biggest business incubators in Italy. After graduation, Nino travelled to Naples, Italy, and stayed there for three months. She got to know Italian startups involved in the pre-incubator to post-incubator processes. Specifically, she worked with the startup E-voluzione, which focuses on applying high-tech solutions to industry, aerospace and specialized research matters.