Nirmala Arunachalam
Director, Break Through Tech Miami
Nimmi Arunachalam is the Program Director of Break Through Tech Miami at the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University (FIU), where she works to increase diversity and gender equity in Miami’s tech ecosystem. Prior to that, Nimmi worked for the School District of Palm Beach County, where she served as the Career and Technical Education Specialist and was previously a computer science teacher at Olympic Heights High School in Boca Raton, Florida. Nimmi has taught AP Computer Science Principles, and AP Computer Science A at her high school and was a master teacher for Project Lead The Way engineering and CS courses.
In her prior career, Nimmi worked as a business analyst in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software industry in Southeast Asia. She has won numerous awards and praise for her work in computer science education. She is the current President of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) chapter for Palm Beach and Broward counties as well as the at-large representative of the national CSTA Board of Directors. She holds a master’s degree in educational leadership from Florida Atlantic University, a master’s degree in business administration from Pondicherry Central University, India, and a Bachelor of Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences, Pilani, India. Nimmi is pursuing her doctoral studies (Ph.D.) in Computer Science Education through FIU’s SUCCEED graduate program.