About Andrew Rogers
Age: 28
Job: Technologist in residence for The Enterprise Center
Career: A native of Huntsville, Ala., he was home schooled and learned about industrial automation and information technology by working in the field for eight years before participating in Harvard University's Young American Leaders Program.
Andrew Rodgers helped shepherd Harvard Business School researcher Manjari Raman around town when she came for Startup Week Chattanooga in October to talk about such things as the need for economic mobility, or the ability for poor people to move into the middle class.
Closing the "digital divide," or the lack of access to the Internet, computer training and hardware for economically disadvantaged residents, is one of the goals of the Enterprise Center. It's a nonprofit organization at the heart of downtown Chattanooga's new Innovation District where Rodgers works as the "technologist in residence."
"I consider that using technology to solve problems," Rodgers says of his job title.
Rodgers, 28, met Raman over the summer, when he was one of 90 young people from around American who took part in the first-ever Young American Leaders Program (YALP), an effort of the U.S. Competitiveness Project at Harvard Business School to develop leaders who understand collaborations that promote shared prosperity.
"It makes sense for businesses to get involved," Rodgers says. "If you have high inequality, you run out of customers for your product."
Rodgers helps with the Enterprise Center's Tech Goes Home Chattanooga program that offers low-income residents 15 hours of tech training after which they can buy either a Chromebook or iPad for $50 and get low-cost Internet access.
Rodgers hopes to help spark innovation and entrepreneurship in Chattanooga by promoting potential uses here for the "Geni Rack" at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. It's a nationwide network that connects 60 research universities that's 10 to 100 times faster than Chattanooga's gigabit-speed Internet.
Rodgers also helps run a noon lunch "meetup" called ChaDevs, which is short for Chattanooga Developers, which brings together about 60 developers of websites and apps who meet at the Enterprise Center, which is located on the fifth floor of the Edney Building at the corner of Market and 11th streets.
"It'll be interesting over the next couple of years to see what we're able to pull off in Chattanooga," Rodgers said.
Rodgers garnered eight years' experience in industrial automation and information technology before he started working at the Enterprise Center.
He got his career as a technologist underway without any formal training. Rodgers, a native of Huntsville, Ala., was home-schooled along with an older brother and sister and didn't attend college.
Rodgers gets high praise from his boss, Ken Hays, president and CEO of the Enterprise Center.
"He is one of the smartest people - street smarts, commonsense smarts - that I've ever met," Hays says.