Software developer is a voice for Muslim women

Layla Shaikley SM ’13 started out her grasp’s in architecture at MIT with a hunger to redevelop international locations recovering from war. when she determined that information and logistics contributed more at once to development than architecture did, ­Shaikley switched to the Media Lab to work with Professor Sandy ­Pentland, and have become a cofounder of smart systems, which develops routing software program that enables organizations supply goods and services.
“There’s not anything extra creative than building a organization,” Shaikley says. “We plan the most effective routes and optimize them in real time the usage of driving force comments. better logistics can dramatically lessen the range of past due deliveries, boom efficiency, and keep gas.”
but Shaikley is perhaps higher acknowledged for a viral video, “Muslim Hipsters: #mipsterz,” that she and buddies created to fight the media stereotypes of Muslim girls. It reached loads of lots of viewers and received lively nice and bad remarks.

The video “is a surely fresh, jovial view of an underrepresented identity: younger American Muslim women with opportunity interests within the arts and tradition,” Shaikley says. “The slender media image is up to now from the actual cloth of Muslim-­American existence that all of us want to add our portions to the duvet to create a more accurate image.”
Shaikley’s mother and father moved from Iraq to California in the 1970s, and she or he and her five siblings enjoyed a “quintessentially all-­American adolescence,” she says. “I grew up on a skateboard, and i really like to surf and snowboard.” She feels deeply grateful to her parents, who “constantly positioned our desires first,” she provides. “whilst we visited family in Iraq, we determined what existence is like whilst people don’t have the privilege of a unfastened society. those reviews absolutely shaped my expertise of the arena and additionally my experience of obligation to give back.”
Shaikley says the sum of her numerous life studies has helped her as a professional with clever structures and as a voice for underrepresented Muslim women.
“My work at MIT underneath [professors] Reinhard Goethert and Sandy ­Pentland changed into critical to my career and expertise of information as it pertains to developing city regions,” she says. “And each piece of my disparate stories, which included the best internship of my existence with NASA running on robotics for Mars, has performed a massive function.”
Shaikley lives in Boston together with her husband, Hadi Durali, who related with her on facebook after reading her 2014 commentary in the Atlantic about the #mipsterz video’s emotional effect. They have been married in August 2016.