Lincoln Heights Board Members Win AT&T Women in Tech Challenge

When they’re not busy improving their community as board members of the Lincoln Heights Neighborhood Council, twin sisters Penelope and America Lopez are hard at work on another project that they hope will “help bridge trust between law enforcement and the public.”

The two women, avid coders and technologists, have developed a prototype for a new kind of wearable, trackable police body camera with face recognition technology that can be used by law enforcement as well as journalists and researchers. The innovation won them the $10,000 grand prize at the Women in Tech Challenge at the 2015 AT&T Developer Summit and Hackathon held in January in Las Vegas.

America Lopez attends LA City College and Penelope is a student at Cal State LA, where the two spend countless hours tooling around in the school’s 24-hour Access Lab, honing their developer skills.

The sisters hope that their success will inspire other Latino youth and women to strive to develop technology skills and break into this industry. “You don’t see a lot of Latinos in start-up tech companies,” Penelope Lopez said. She and her sister plan to build a website in Spanish and English that includes video tutorials on how to develop apps and wearable technology.