Marita ChengSpeaker and Booking Agent Information

It won five awards later that year, including the highest prize, the Innovation Excellence Award, at Tech23 2013, Australia's most prestigious pitching competition. Following that, 2Mar was displayed at CES 2014, the world's largest consumer electronics exhibition, which drew 140,000 attendees to Las Vegas, and Marita was dubbed the coolest female at CES 2014 by VentureBeat.

As the Founder and Executive Director of Robogals Global, Marita was selected as the 2012 Young Australian of the Year for exhibiting vision and leadership well beyond her years.

Marita gathered her other engineering peers and went to schools to teach girls robotics as a method to promote females into engineering after noticing the low proportion of girls in her engineering lectures at the University of Melbourne.

Marita moved the group to London while on academic exchange at Imperial College London, and subsequently spread Robogals throughout Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan via the invention and pure willpower. To promote young women to engineering, the organization hosts robotics workshops, career lectures, and other community events.

Robogals has already taught our robotics workshops to 30,000 females from 9 countries over 27 chapters. Robogals has received awards from throughout the world, including the Global Engineering Deans Council Diversity in Engineering Award (2014), the Grace Hopper Celebration's Anita Borg Change Agent Award (2011), and the International Youth Foundation's YouthActionNet Fellowship (2011).

Marita often travels across Australia presenting her work, including appearances on Q&A on ABC with two Nobel Laureates and Australia's Chief Scientist (TV viewership 600,000) and at Lenovo's #TechMyWay event with Ashton Kutcher (online audience 35,000).

She's also spoken at EmTech Singapore (2015), the World Entrepreneurship Forum in France (2014), the World Engineering Education Forum in Dubai (2014), and the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts' World Conference in Hong Kong (2014). Marita was born in the Australian city of Cairns.

Her brother and single-parent mother, who worked as a hotel room maid, raised her in a housing commission. In 2006, she graduated from high school in the top 0.2 percent of the country and was named Cairns Young Citizen of the Year for her voluntary and extracurricular activities. Marita is multilingual, speaking English, Cantonese, and Japanese.

Marita graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechatronics) / Bachelor of Computer Science. She is a member of the boards of Robogals Global, the Foundation for Young Australians, and RMIT's New Enterprise Investment Fund, where she assists in the decision-making process for startup investments. Marita spends her free time reading, traveling, and daydreaming.