Adriana Alvarado

Adriana’s story begins in a modest home in Peru. She grew up watching her mother walk long distances to pay for ballet classes for her sister—and later, for herself. While ballet taught her discipline, it was mathematics that truly captured her heart.

Raised in a low-income family with roots in Áncash, Huancavelica, and Moquegua, her academic path has been marked by perseverance. She earned merit-based scholarships every school year and was part of the High-Performance Program, excelling in a highly competitive environment. he left ballet just before her first South American competition to focus fully on mathematics. This led her to win a silver medal and be part of the team that placed Peru first at the 2022 Pan-American Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad, as well as earn an Honorable Mention at the 2024 Ibero-American Olympiad in Informatics.

During the pandemic, she shared a single family computer, hand-copying exercises to keep studying. Later, she self-financed a laptop with income from tutoring—and with that device, she now creates programs and teaches others.

At age 16, she co-founded SigMath, the first student-led STEM outreach initiative at her school, which evolved into a regional force. With a team of 30 young people across Latin America, SigMath has organized over 70 classes and events, reaching more than 800 students across 20 regions in Peru and 12 Latin American countries. SigMath’s teaching method, called Rimaykuy, focuses on explaining the “why” and “what for” of mathematics. Adriana also led FestiMath, the first student math festival in Lima, supported by Clubes de Ciencia Perú and the Institute of Mathematics and Related Sciences (IMCA). The event brought together teens from nine Latin American countries for creative challenges, outreach talks, and math games.

In the tech space, Adriana has led high-impact events like the Girls in Tech Summit, AI-Powered Solutions Design Challenge, and Microsoft Start-Up Challenge at Microsoft Peru’s offices, as a collaborator of Microsoft HOLA-DFW. These connected over 200 high school and university students with mentors, professionals, and opportunities. She also co-organized Counterspell Lima, Peru’s first school-based game jam, where high schoolers developed their own video games.

Passionate about bringing quantum computing to more youth, Adriana co-founded Quantum Hub Perú, whose free course will launch on July 19 with international academics and a clear goal: to train the next generation of quantum scientists in Peru. The initiative was born after she became the only Latina selected from 330 global applicants for the BeyondQuantum program. She is also currently a research intern with the international program QIntern, contributing to the design of a framework for efficient computing in distributed quantum systems.

Globally, she represented Peru as a youth activist at the Beijing+30 Global Adolescent Girl Leadership Town Hall, organized by UN Women, where she advocated for greater digital access for Latin American girls. Locally, she helped bring the LEAD program—driven by Microsoft and IBM engineers—to Peru. It now operates in 10 universities and connects students with global tech mentors.

If she wins the Global Student Prize, Adriana plans to fund in-person math workshops in rural areas, offer scholarships for low-income students to attend FestiMath 2025, and scale Quantum Hub Perú into a Latin American movement training quantum scientists committed to the region.

A quiet force for change, Adriana’s journey—from handwritten notes to quantum simulations—is not only a story of talent, but one of resilience, faith, purpose, and the conviction that education can transform everything.