Alum, Catt Small, named Technologist of the Year at Brooklyn Innovation Awards

It was just last September when we reported that Catherine “Catt” Small, then studying for a master’s degree in Integrated Digital Media here, had received the prestigious Generation Google Scholarship, established to help aspiring computer scientists from underrepresented groups become leaders in the tech industry.

The honors continue to roll in for Small, who graduated this January. On the 28th of that month, she was named Technologist of the Year at the inaugural Brooklyn Innovation Awards, launched to celebrate and strengthen the borough’s tech community. Small was honored for her important work in making the world of game development a more welcoming one for women and people of color, among others. “The more diverse people we get into gaming the more interesting perspectives we’ll have,” she told a reporter for Technical.ly Brooklyn, the publication that sponsored the awards.

Among the organizations co-founded by Small, already a seasoned game developer and Web designer despite her very recent graduation, are:

• Tech under Thirty, a vibrant networking group for young designers, developers, and engineers;
• Code Liberation, which offers free development workshops in order to facilitate the creation of video game titles by women; and
• Brooklyn Gamery, which makes high-quality games for a variety of devices and operating systems.

Last year, when she was a student at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Dean Katepalli Sreenivasan deemed Small an inspiration to other women and said, “She is a force to be reckoned with in Brooklyn’s tech community, and we are proud to call her one of our own.”