About

Michele Ong is a creative technologist whose work spans software, writing, and audio. She’s an advocate for women in STEMM, for diversity in all its forms, and for keeping the humanity in STEAM fields.

Despite the solitary nature of a lot of that work, she rather likes people. Her Computer Science Honours thesis looked at psychometrics — investigating the qualities that contribute to success in computing — and the experience left her with a lasting interest in the anthropology of STEMM, and the belief that runs through everything else here: the good stuff happens where disciplines meet.

That curiosity is what led her to produce STEAM Powered, a podcast and YouTube series featuring conversations with women in STEAM, giving space and attention to work and perspectives that don’t always get it. Since launch, she has spoken with 85 women from around the world (plus one on Florence Nightingale), with an audience spanning more than 50 countries, covering topics ranging across STEMM fields as well as mental health, changing careers, motherhood, and the two-body problem. The show has charted in top lists for Women in STEM, Science, and Indie categories, and Michele serves as a Blue Ribbon Panel Judge for the Ambies, the podcast industry’s annual awards.

Where the podcast draws stories out in conversation, her Substack, Life, the Universe, and STEAM, works the same territory from the other direction through essays on AI ethics, privacy, and human-centred technology. Her writing isn’t confined to nonfiction, either; fiction is part of the practice too.

She also builds, most recently Podbite, made for indie podcasters who need a better way to share and track their work, built out of a gap she felt directly in her own production process.

She writes, builds, and produces — and advises founders and owner-operators through Tourbillon Labs, where the work is independent judgement on technology decisions that need to be aligned with their values, goals, and capacity for growth.