In science, Jess Peláez says, you don't understand something until you can replicate it. And after living in Australia and Mexico and working around the world, Jess realized no one had a complete understanding, or replications, of the Earth's very diverse environments. She decided society needed Blueprint Earth — so she did what any budding entrepreneur would and started it herself.
Blueprint Earth is an environmental scientific research nonprofit that’s attempting to catalog a part of the Mojave Desert in enough detail to then recreate a living desert inside a warehouse. As co-founder and CEO, Jess gets to wear many hats; variation that suits a woman who started with a liberal arts degree, then got a science degree and has skills honed from 15 years of working in fields as varied as veterinary medicine to software sales.
Jess is proud that Blueprint Earth is achieving unprecedented levels of collaboration across different scientific fields. She’s also proud of the diversity her organization brings to the field: to date, six of Blueprint Earth’s nine board members are women, 71 percent of their researchers have been female and 50 percent have been minorities. Another big coup? Blueprint Earth is also entirely crowdfunded!