Always Question, Always Wonder!.

Temple Lester is the gifted, award-winning 14-year-old creator of “STEM Girl Swag” and the inventor of the STEM Swag Box. She is an entrepreneur, public speaker, science communicator, and STEM advocate. Temple launched www.JustTemple.com, a website designed to get more of her peers - especially girls - interested in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Technology (STEM). Temple’s free science workshops, social media engagements, and motivational talks have exposed more than 100,000 people to STEM!

Temple has received many awards and honors for her advocacy. She was recently recognized as a Time Magazine Kid of the Year Top 50 (2022), was selected to Black Girls Lead (2021), and has had 2 award-winning National History Day documentaries featured in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (2020 & 2021). Temple appears in the AD Council’s National PSA Campaign “Dare To STEM” (2020-2022). In 2019 she was named as one of Atlanta’s “20 Under 20” by Atlanta Intown Paper, and the DeKalb County Chamber of Commerce honored her as its 2019 “Youth Entrepreneur of the Year.” The Corporate Volunteer Council recognized Temple’s leadership and innovation by presenting her with the prestigious 2019 Carol D. Reiser Youth Service Award. In 2017, she was the Georgia Science Teachers Association (GSTA) STEM-Talk winner. Temple is also a Girl Scouts Silver Award Winner.

The “STEM Swag Box” was created by Temple in 2019 to make STEM-education fun. The STEM Swag Box, exploding with hands-on experiments, has been called “the coolest science kit ever!”. The kits, along with other items from her STEM Girl Swag collection, are sold online and have been purchased by STEM enthusiasts from around the world. Additionally, as part of her mission of exposing as many youths as possible to STEM and filling the gap, Temple created a Go-Fund-Me campaign that has raised in excess of $5,000 to help provide free STEM Swag Boxes to underrepresented youth.

Temple is captivated by stars, planets, and galaxies. She aspires to be an astrophysicist so that she can understand the universe and our place in it.