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Sophia Danenberg The first African American and first Black woman to climb Mount Everest
Sophia grew up in an “indoorsy” family. She was not introduced to hiking or camping until college, when she signed up for a backpacking trip across New Hampshire’s Presidential Range with the Harvard Freshman Outdoor Program. Sophia continued to explore the outdoors, learning to rock and ice climb, and eventually mountaineer. She has climbed all over the world from the Matterhorn and Chamonix in the Alps, to Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya in Africa, to Aconcagua in South America. In 2006 became the first black woman and first African-American to summit Mount Everest. In addition to climbing, Sophia is on the board of NatureBridge, an organization that provides hands-on environmental education to students in national parks. She volunteers as a track & field official with Special Olympics and on the Legislative & Public Affairs committees for the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA.) She is also a Washington State Parks and Recreation Commissioner and a member of the King County redistricting committee. Professionally, Sophia leads international environmental policy analysis in Global Enterprise Sustainability at Boeing. Before starting her career, she was a researcher-writer for a travel guide in Thailand and Laos and Fulbright Fellow at Keio University in Tokyo.