Léa Steinacker

Steinacker grew up in Walsrode, Germany. She excelled academically, skipping the sixth grade and winning the Lower Saxony state prize for English in 2003.[4] She was active in sports, playing tennis as part of a Walsroder team competing nationally for a position in the German Jugend trainiert für Olympia (Youth Training for the Olympics) program.[5]

In 2005, Steinacker moved to Wales to attend UWC Atlantic, and graduated with an International Baccalaureate Diploma in 2007.[6]

In 2011, Princeton University awarded her with a Bachelor of Arts with honors in International Affairs and a minor in African Studies. Her senior thesis, "An ecological approach to the risks of female sex workers in rural Kenya," was supervised by Professor of Psychology Elizabeth Levy Paluck.[7] Her attendance at Princeton was supported by the Davis United World College Scholars Program, where she was a class of 2011 scholar,[8] and her studies included a year at The American University in Cairo. For her senior thesis research in Kenya, she was partially funded by the Adel Mahmoud Global Health Scholarship.[9]

In 2015, Steinacker earned a Master of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and was a McCloy Fellow.[10] She also participated in the first White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism on the recommendation of Farah Pandith, who served previously as the first-ever special representative to Muslim communities.[11]

In 2022, she completed her PhD at the University of St. Gallen. Her doctoral thesis, "Code Capital: A Sociotechnical Framework to Understand the Implications of Artificially Intelligent Systems from Design to Deployment," was advised by Prof. Dr. Damian Borth (Artificial Intelligence) and Prof. Dr. Veronica Barassi (Digital Anthropology).[12]

During her time at Princeton, Steinacker interned at a Hanover radio station reporting on political news.[13]

In the early 2010s, she focused on humanitarian and social justice work with NGOs in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo[13] and provided first-person reports for the Walsroder Zeitung (Walsroder Newspaper) before being evacuated from Bukavu during the M23 rebellion.[14][15]

After her studies at Harvard, she joined the Handelsblatt Media Group as a Digital Scout for Germany's leading business magazine WirtschaftsWoche, eventually becoming the Chief Innovation Officer of WirtschaftsWoche in 2017.[16]

In 2018, WirtschaftsWoche created a professional development community focused on upskilling around technology-driven topics, called ada, with Steinacker assuming the role of "Chief Strategy Officer"[17]

In October 2020, ada Learning GmbH was founded by Steinacker, Miriam Meckel, Verena Pausder and Handelsblatt Media Group, with Steinacker assuming the role of Founder and Chief Innovation Officer.[1]

Since 2021, Steinacker is also a lecturer at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, teaching courses on technology such as "Social and Economic Impacts of Artificial Intelligence".[18]

Together with other notable supporters including German TV anchor Dunya Hayali, she is an investor in the female soccer club FC Viktoria Berlin.

• 2011: Henry Richardson Labouisse Prize by Princeton University, an award of "$25,000 to each recipient to support research in developing countries by graduating seniors who intend to pursue a career devoted to problems of development and modernization." [19]
• 2013: McCloy Fellowship to study at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government by the Studienstiftung (German Academic Scholarship Foundation).[20]
• 2015: Munich Young Leader by the Munich Security Conference and Körber Stiftung.[21]
• 2016: Young Leader by Atlantik-Brücke (Atlantic Bridge).[22]