Kimmy Sitthisack is a first-generation American — the daughter of Laotian immigrants, raised in the inner city of Rochester, New York. She wrote her first line of HTML as a teenager, not in a classroom, but out of curiosity. From MySpace to her high school's robotics team to a Computer Science degree from the University of Rochester, the throughline was always the same: she didn't just want to use the internet. She wanted to design the infrastructure behind it.

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Her academic path ran through Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Human-Computer Interaction, and a research career she ultimately chose to walk away from — not out of failure, but out of clarity. A health crisis forced her to slow down, reassess, and decide that if she was going to spend her life behind a screen, the work had to matter.