The IEEE Board of Directors shapes the future direction of IEEE and is committed to ensuring IEEE remains a strong and vibrant organization—serving the needs of its members and the engineering and technology community worldwide—while fulfilling the IEEE mission of advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.

This article features IEEE Board of Directors members A. Matt Francis, Tom Murad, and Christopher Root.

IEEE Senior Member A. Matt Francis

Director, IEEE Region 5: Southwestern U.S.

Moriah Hargrove Anders

Francis’s primary technology focus is extreme environment and high-temperature integrated circuits. His groundbreaking work has pushed the boundaries of electronics, leading to computers operating in low Earth orbit for more than a year on the International Space Station and on jet engines. Francis and his team have designed and built some of the world’s most rugged semiconductors and systems.

He is currently helping explore new computing frontiers in supersonic and hypersonic flight, geothermal energy exploration, and molten salt reactors. Well versed in shifting technology from idea to commercial application, Francis has secured and led projects with the U.S. Air Force, DARPA, NASA, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and private-sector customers.

Francis’s influence extends beyond his own ventures. He is a member of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems, IEEE Computer, and IEEE Electronics Packaging societies, demonstrating his commitment to industry and continuous learning.

He attended the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville for both his undergraduate and graduate degrees. He joined IEEE while at the university and was president of the IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu honor society’s Gamma Phi chapter. Francis’s other past volunteer roles include serving as chair of the IEEE Ozark Section, which covers Northwest Arkansas, and also as a member of the IEEE-USA Entrepreneurship Policy Innovation Committee.

His deep-rooted belief in the power of collaboration is evident in his willingness to share knowledge and support aspiring entrepreneurs. Francis is proud to have helped found a robotics club (an IEEE MGA Local Group) in his rural Elkins, Ark., community and to have served on steering committees for programs including IEEE TryEngineering and IEEE-USA’s Innovation, Research, and Workforce Conferences. He serves as an elected city council member for his town, and has cofounded two non-profits, supporting his community and the state of Arkansas.

Francis’s journey from entrepreneur to industry leader is a testament to his determination and innovative mindset. He has received numerous awards including the IEEE-USA Entrepreneur Achievement Award for Leadership in Entrepreneurial Spirit, IEEE Region 5 Directors Award, and IEEE Region 5 Outstanding Individual Member Achievement Award.

IEEE Senior Member Tom Murad

Director, IEEE Region 7: Canada

Siemens Canada

Murad is a respected technology leader, award-winning educator, and distinguished speaker on engineering, skills development, and education. Recently retired, he has 40 years of experience in professional engineering and technical operations executive management, including more than 10 years of academic and R&D work in industrial controls and automation.

He received his doctorate (Ph.D.) degree in power electronics and industrial controls from Loughborough University of Technology in the U.K.

Murad has held high-level positions in several international engineering and industrial organizations, and he contributed to many global industrial projects. His work on projects in power utilities, nuclear power, oil and gas, mining, automotive, and infrastructure industries has directly impacted society and positively contributed to the economy. He is a strong advocate of innovation and creativity, particularly in the areas of digitalization, smart infrastructure, and Industry 4.0. He continues his academic career as an adjunct professor at University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.

His dedication to enhancing the capabilities of new generations of engineers is a source of hope and optimism. His work in significantly improving the quality and relevance of engineering and technical education in Canada is a testament to his commitment to the future of the engineering profession and community. For that he has been assigned by the Ontario Government to be a member of the board of directors of the Post Secondary Education Quality Assessment Board (PEQAB).

Murad is a member of the IEEE Technology and Engineering Management, IEEE Education, IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems, and IEEE Vehicular Technology societies, the IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu honor society, and the Editorial Advisory Board Chair for the IEEE Canadian Review Magazine. His accomplishments show his passion for the engineering profession and community.

He is a member of the Order of Honor of the Professional Engineers of Ontario, Canada, Fellow of Engineers Canada, Fellow of Engineering Institutes of Canada (EIC), and received the IEEE Canada J.M. Ham Outstanding Engineering Educator Award, among other recognitions highlighting his impact on the field.

IEEE Senior Member Christopher Root

Director, Division VII

Vermont Electric Power Company and Shana Louiselle

Root has been in the electric utility industry for more than 40 years and is an expert in power system operations, engineering, and emergency response. He has vast experience in the operations, construction, and maintenance of transmission and distribution utilities, including all phases of the engineering and design of power systems. He has shared his expertise through numerous technical presentations on utility topics worldwide.

Currently an industry advisor and consultant, Root focuses on the crucial task of decarbonizing electricity production. He is engaged in addressing the challenges of balancing an increasing electrical market and dependence on renewable energy with the need to provide low-cost, reliable electricity on demand.

Root’s journey with IEEE began in 1983 when he attended his first meeting as a graduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, N.Y. Since then, he has served in leadership roles such as treasurer, secretary, and member-at-large of the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES). His commitment to the IEEE mission and vision is evident in his efforts to revitalize the dormant IEEE PES Boston Chapter in 2007 and his instrumental role in establishing the IEEE PES Green Mountain Section in Vermont in 2015. He also is a member of the editorial board of the IEEE Power & Energy Magazine and the IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu honor society.

There were early signs that Muhammad Hamza Ihtisham was born to excel in engineering or computer science, but family tradition initially steered him toward a career in medicine. Ihtisham’s mother and other family members were medical professionals. His father is a businessman.

Even though his father had dreamed of having a son in the engineering field, it was assumed that Ihtisham would become a doctor. And he almost did. But when he didn’t pass the medical qualifying exams in high school, he saw it as a sign to switch professions.

Muhammad Hamza Ihtisham

Employer:

Jazz in Lahore, Pakistan

Title:

Network experience specialist in radio

Member grade:

IEEE member

Alma mater:

University of the Punjab

“I asked my parents and my principal for permission to switch my focus from medicine to computer science,” he says. Although the change took effect only three months before he had to take exams, he scored high enough to place third among the computer science students at his school. He has never looked back.

Ihtisham is now a network experience specialist in radio at the largest telecommunications provider in Pakistan: Lahore-based Jazz. Ihtisham monitors, supervises, and troubleshoots nationwide wireless networks and is a team player who implements smart systems and AI-based solutions to optimize network performance.

“We are working with 2G, 3G, and 4G network supervision,” he says, “and we’re also evolving for 5G and optical fiber networks.”

Muhammad Hamza Ihtisham chats with 2018 IEEE President Jim Jefferies.Muhammad Hamza Ihtisham

Early evidence of STEM affinity

Ihtisham didn’t need much encouragement to become an engineer, he says, adding that he always has wanted to work with technology.

When he was young, his father bought him a computer with a Pentium II CPU “at a time when there were very few computers in my town,” he says.

Ihtisham’s curiosity led him to dismantle and explore its components, fostering a deeper interest in technology.

“I destroyed many motherboards and processors when I pulled them out of the computer to see how they worked,” he says. It was part of his innate tendency to get to the bottom of how things worked. “I still have that spark in me, that inner child who wants to open things up and investigate how they work.”

He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering with a specialization in telecommunications from the University of the Punjab in 2018. He returned to pursue a master’s degree in industrial engineering and management—which he received in 2022.

Thanks to his IEEE connections, Ihtisham secured his position at Jazz even before getting his bachelor’s degree. As the university’s IEEE student branch chair, Ihtisham invited an engineer from Jazz to speak to students on campus. When Ihtisham later showed up at the company for a job interview, that same engineer was the department head and immediately recognized him.

Since his college days, Ihtisham has poured time and energy into giving back to the profession through participation in IEEE. He founded his school’s student chapter and today serves as chair of the IEEE Lahore Section’s Young Professionals group. He is also the deputy lead of the global technical and operation committee of the IEEE Young Professionals mentoring program, which connects experts with mentees to help them learn and further their career.

Active IEEE student leader

Ihtisham entered college thinking he would become a computer scientist, but before long he became convinced that his true passion lay in engineering. Noticing a gap in student activities within the school’s EE department, he joined IEEE in his third semester.

Although the university was more than 150 years old, electrical engineering was a relatively new course of study there.

“My graduating class had only the 10th cohort of graduates to earn that degree from the university,” he says.

As founder of the school’s IEEE student branch, Ihtisham set about adding activities and opportunities for would-be engineers that he felt were missing. He was the branch’s first chair, organizing activities, boosting membership, and overseeing initiatives that impacted his university and the wider IEEE Lahore Section. He was then appointed a student representative for the section.

“That was a turning point for me,” he says.

He originally started volunteering with IEEE for a pragmatic purpose that served the entire engineering student body, he says, but as he settled into his new leadership roles, volunteering became a source of personal fulfillment and development.

“When I started my IEEE journey, I was not prepared. But I worked on my leadership, my behavior, and improving my soft skills. So, you could say my involvement with IEEE has transformed my personality and served as leadership training.”

For his efforts, he has been recognized with several awards including the IEEE Lahore Section’s 2018 Outstanding Volunteer for organizing student activities and conferences.

“When I started my IEEE journey, I was not well groomed,” Ihistham says. “But I worked on my leadership, my behavior, and improving my soft skills. So, you could say my involvement with IEEE has transformed my personality and served as leadership training.”

The communications and negotiating skills he picked up by networking with IEEE members across the globe have benefited him at Jazz, he says.

His dedication to IEEE didn’t end with his student years. Today his roles involve mentoring, networking, and leading initiatives to foster growth and collaboration in the engineering community.

Now his leadership skills help him manage and motivate other volunteers and mentor engineering students. He received the 2021 IEEE MGA Young Professionals Achievement Award for organizing YP activities and the 2021 IEEE IAS Young Member Service Award for virtually engaging IEEE Industry Applications Society members during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Advice for aspiring engineers

To students considering a career in electrical engineering, Ihtisham emphasizes the importance of finding the right mentors and embracing open-source collaboration. He advises discussing ideas with experts to gain valuable insights and foster innovative thinking.

His success story underscores the value of mentorship, continuous learning, and community engagement. While he was in graduate school working toward his master’s degree, he began doing research to develop an effective and reliable brain-computer interface. He talked with the medical professionals in his family for information about how the brain works but then found himself at an impasse because there were not enough datasets in Pakistan for training his machine-learning software.

He reached out to the IEEE community and found a mentor for the project at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Their collaboration was fruitful enough that Ihtisham was invited to present a TEDx talk on what he had learned about addiction and neurofeedback.

Based on that project, he took home third prize in the IEEE IAS Chapters and Membership Department Zucker Undergraduate Student Design Contest in 2019.

Ihtisham’s journey with IEEE exemplifies the impact of dedication, mentorship, and continued learning on building an interesting and successful engineering career.

“My success is having an impact on my younger cousins,” he says. “If they want to pursue a career in engineering or another STEM field, they have someone in the family who can guide them.”

In the two years since Arati Prabhakar was appointed director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, she has set the United States on a course toward regulating artificial intelligence. The IEEE Fellow advised the U.S. President Joe Biden in writing the executive order he issued to accomplish the goal just six months after she began her new role in 2022.

Prabhakar is the first woman and the first person of color to serve as OSTP director, and she has broken through the glass ceiling at other agencies as well. She was the first woman to lead the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Arati Prabhakar

Employer

U.S. government

Title

Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

Member grade

Fellow

Alma maters

Texas Tech University; Caltech

Working in the public sector wasn’t initially on her radar. Not until she became a DARPA program manager in 1986, she says, did she really understand what she could accomplish as a government official.

“What I have come to love about [public service] is the opportunity to shape policies at a scale that is really unparalleled,” she says.

Prabhakar’s passion for tackling societal challenges by developing technology also led her to take leadership positions at companies including Raychem (now part of TE Connectivity), Interval Research Corp., and U.S. Venture Partners. In 2019 she helped found Actuate, a nonprofit in Palo Alto, Calif., that seeks to create technology to help address climate change, data privacy, health care access, and other pressing issues.

“I really treasure having seen science, technology, and innovation from all different perspectives,” she says. “But the part I have loved most is public service because of the impact and reach that it can have.”

Discovering her passion for electrical engineering

Prabhakar, who was born in India and raised in Texas, says she decided to pursue a STEM career because when she was growing up, her classmates said women weren’t supposed to work in science, technology, engineering or mathematics.

“Them saying that just made me want to pursue it more,” she says. Her parents, who had wanted her to become a doctor, supported her pursuit of engineering, she adds.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1979 from Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, she moved to California to continue her education at Caltech. She graduated with a master’s degree in EE in 1980, then earned a doctorate in applied physics in 1984. Her doctoral thesis focused on understanding deep-level defects and impurities in semiconductors that affect device performance.

After acquiring her Ph.D., she says, she wanted to make a bigger impact with her research than academia would allow, so she applied for a policy fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science to work at the congressional Office of Technology Assessment. The office examines issues involving new or expanding technologies, assesses their impact, and studies whether new policies are warranted.

“We have huge aspirations for the future—such as mitigating climate change—that science and technology have to be part of achieving.”

“I wanted to share my research in semiconductor manufacturing processes with others,” Prabhakar says. “That’s what felt exciting and valuable to me.”

She was accepted into the program and moved to Washington, D.C. During the yearlong fellowship, she conducted a study on microelectronics R&D for the research and technology subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives committee on science, space, and technology. The subcommittee oversees STEM-related matters including education, policy, and standards.

While there, she worked with people who were passionate about public service and government, but she didn’t feel the same, she says, until she joined DARPA. As program manager, Prabhakar established and led several projects including a microelectronics office that invests in developing new technologies in areas such as lithography, optoelectronics, infrared imaging, and neural networks.

In 1993 an opportunity arose that she couldn’t refuse, she says: President Bill Clinton nominated her to direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST develops technical guidelines and conducts research to create tools that improve citizens’ quality of life. At age 34, she became the first woman to lead the agency.

Believing in IEEE’s Mission

Like many IEEE members, Prabhakar says, she joined IEEE as a student member while attending Texas Tech University because the organization’s mission aligned with her belief that engineering is about creating value in the world.

She continues to renew her membership, she says, because IEEE emphasizes that technology should benefit humanity.

“It really comes back to this idea of the purpose of engineering and the role that it plays in the world,” she says.

After leading NIST through the first Clinton administration, she left for the private sector, including stints as CTO at appliance-component maker Raychem in Menlo Park, Calif., and president of private R&D lab Interval Research of Palo Alto, Calif. In all, she spent the next 14 years in the private sector, mostly as a partner at U.S. Venture Partners, in Menlo Park, where she invested in semiconductor and clean-tech startups.

In 2012 she returned to DARPA and became its first female director.

“When I received the call offering me the job, I stopped breathing,” Prabhakar says. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a difference at an agency that I had loved earlier in my career. And it proved to be just as meaningful an experience as I had hoped.”

For the next five years she led the agency, focusing on developing better military systems and the next generation of artificial intelligence, as well as creating solutions in social science, synthetic biology, and neurotechnology.

Under her leadership, in 2014 DARPA established the Biological Technologies Office to oversee basic and applied research in areas including gene editing, neurosciences, and synthetic biology. The office launched the Pandemic Prevention Platform, which helped fund the development of the mRNA technology that is used in the Moderna and Pfizer coronavirus vaccines.

She left the agency in 2017 to move back to California with her family.

“When I left the organization, what was very much on my mind was that the United States has the most powerful innovation engine the world has ever seen,” Prabhakar says. “At the same time, what kept tugging at me was that we have huge aspirations for the future—such as mitigating climate change—that science and technology have to be part of achieving.”

That’s why, in 2019, she helped found Actuate. She served as the nonprofit’s chief executive until 2022, when she took on the role of OSTP director.

Although she didn’t choose her career path because it was her passion, she says, she came to realize that she loves the role that engineering, science, and technology play in the world because of their “power to change how the future unfolds.”

Leading AI regulation worldwide

When Biden asked if Prabhakar would take the OSTP job, she didn’t think twice, she says. “When do you need me to move in?” she says she told him.

“I was so excited to work for the president because he sees science and technology as a necessary part of creating a bright future for the country,” Prabhakar says.

A month after she took office, the generative AI program ChatGPT launched and became a hot topic.

“AI was already being used in different areas, but all of a sudden it became visible to everyone in a way that it really hadn’t been before,” she says.

Regulating AI became a priority for the Biden administration because of the technology’s breadth and power, she says, as well as the rapid pace at which it’s being developed.

Prabhakar led the creation of Biden’s Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. Signed on 30 October 2022, the order outlines goals such as protecting consumers and their privacy from AI systems, developing watermarking systems for AI-generated content, and warding off intellectual property theft stemming from the use of generative models.

“The executive order is possibly the most important accomplishment in relation to AI,” Prabhakar says. “It’s a tool that mobilizes the [U.S. government’s] executive branch and recognizes that such systems have safety and security risks, but [it] also enables immense opportunity. The order has put the branches of government on a very constructive path toward regulation.”

Meanwhile, the United States spearheaded a U.N. resolution to make regulating AI an international priority. The United Nations adopted the measure this past March. In addition to defining regulations, it seeks to use AI to advance progress on the U.N.’s sustainable development goals.

“There’s much more to be done,” Prabhakar says, “but I’m really happy to see what the president has been able to accomplish, and really proud that I got to help with that.”

Sharlene Brown often accompanied her husband, IEEE Senior Member Damith Wickramanayake, to organization meetings. He has held leadership positions in the IEEE Jamaica Section, in IEEE Region 3, and on the IEEE Member and Geographic Activities board. Both are from Jamaica.

She either waited outside the conference room or helped with tasks such as serving refreshments. Even though her husband encouraged her to sit in on the meetings, she says, she felt uncomfortable doing so because she wasn’t an engineer. Brown is an accountant and human resources professional. Her husband is a computer science professor at the University of Technology, Jamaica, in Kingston. He is currently Region 3’s education activities coordinator and a member of the section’s education and outreach committee for the IEEE Educational Activities Board.

Sharlene Brown

Employer

Maritime Authority of Jamaica, in Kingston

Title

Assistant accountant

Member grade

Senior member

Alma mater

University of Technology, Jamaica, in Kingston; Tsinghua University, in Beijing

After earning her master’s degree in public administration in 2017, Brown says, she felt she finally was qualified to join IEEE, so she applied. Membership is open to individuals who, by education or experience, are competent in different fields including management. She was approved the same year.

“When I joined IEEE, I would spend long hours at night reading various operations manuals and policies because I wanted to know what I was getting into,” she says. “I was always learning. That’s how I got to know a lot of things about the organization.”

Brown is now a senior member and an active IEEE volunteer. She founded the Jamaica Section’s Women in Engineering group; established a student branch; sits on several high-level IEEE boards; and ran several successful recruitment campaigns to increase the number of senior members in Jamaica and throughout Region 3.

Brown was also a member of the subcommittee of the global Women in Engineering committee; she served as membership coordinator and ran several successful senior member campaigns, elevating women on the committee and across IEEE.

Brown also was integral in the promotion and follow-up activities for the One IEEE event held in January at the University of Technology, Jamaica. The first-of-its-kind workshop connected more than 200 participants to each other and to the organization by showcasing Jamaica’s active engineering community. The Jamaica Section has 135 IEEE members.

From factory worker to accountant

Brown grew up in Bog Walk, a rural town in the parish of St. Catherine. Because she had low grades in high school, the only job she was able to get after graduating was as a temporary factory worker at the nearby Nestlé plant. She worked as many shifts as she could to help support her family.

“I didn’t mind working,” she says, “because I was making my mark. Anything I do, I am going to be excellent at, whether it’s cleaning the floor or doing office work.” But she had bigger plans than being a factory worker, she says.

A friend told her about a temporary job overseeing exams at the Jamaican Institute of Management, now part of the University of Technology. Brown worked both jobs for a time until the school hired her full time to do administrative work in its accounting department.

One of the perks of working there was free tuition for employees, and Brown took full advantage. She studied information management and computer applications, Jamaican securities, fraud detection, forensic auditing, and supervisory management, earning an associate degree in business administration in 2007. The school hired her in 2002 as an accountant, and she worked there for five years.

In 2007 she joined the Office of the Prime Minister, in Kingston, initially as an officer handling payments to suppliers. Her hard work and positive attitude got her noticed by other managers, she says. After a month she was tapped by the budget department to become a commitment control officer, responsible for allocating and overseeing funding for four of the country’s ministries.

“What I realized through my volunteer work in IEEE is that you’re never alone. There is always somebody to guide you.”

As a young accountant, she didn’t have hands-on experience with budgeting, but she was a quick learner who produced quality work, she says. She learned the budgeting process by helping her colleagues when her work slowed down and during her lunch breaks.

That knowledge gave her the skills she needed to land her current job as an assistant accountant with the budget and management accounts group in the Maritime Authority of Jamaica accounts department, a position she has held since 2013.

While she was working for the Office of the Prime Minister, Brown continued to further her education. She took night courses at the University of Technology and, in 2012, earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration. She majored in accounting and minored in human resources management.

She secured a full scholarship in 2016 from the Chinese government to study public administration in Beijing at Tsinghua University, earning a master’s degree with distinction in 2017.

Brown says she is now ready to shift to a human resources career. Even though she has been supervising people for more than 17 years, though, she is having a hard time finding an HR position, she says.

Still willing to take on challenges, she is increasing her experience by volunteering with an HR consulting firm in Jamaica. To get more formal training, she is currently working on an HR certification from the Society for Human Resource Management.

Sharlene Brown arranged for the purchase of 350 desk shields for Jamaican schools during the COVID-19 pandemic.Sharlene Brown

Building a vibrant community

After graduating from Tsinghua University, Brown began volunteering for the IEEE Jamaica Section and Region 3.

In 2019 she founded the section’s IEEE Women in Engineering affinity group, which she chaired for three years. She advocated for more women in leadership roles and has run successful campaigns to increase the number of female senior members locally, regionally, and globally across IEEE. She herself was elevated to senior member in 2019.

Brown also got the WIE group more involved in helping the community. One project she is particularly proud of is the purchase of 350 desk shields for Jamaican schools so students could more safely attend classes and examination sessions in person during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Brown was inspired to undertake the project when a student explained on a local news program that his family couldn’t afford Internet for their home, so he was unable to attend classes remotely.

“Every time I watched the video clip, I would cry,” she says. “This young man might be the next engineer, the country’s next minister, or the next professional.

“I’m so happy we were able to get funding from Region 3 and a local organization to provide those shields.”

She established an IEEE student branch at the Caribbean Maritime University, in Kingston. The branch had almost 40 students at the time of formation.

Brown is working to form student branches at other Jamaican universities, and she is attempting to establish an IEEE Power & Energy Society chapter in the section.

She is a member of several IEEE committees including the Election Oversight and Tellers. She serves as chair for the region’s Professional Activities Committee.

“What I realized through my volunteer work in IEEE is that you’re never alone,” she says. “There is always somebody to help guide you. If they don’t know something, they will point you to the person who does.

“Also, you’re allowed to make mistakes,” she says. “In some organizations, if you make a mistake, you might lose your job or have to pay for your error. But IEEE is your professional home, where you learn, grow, and make mistakes.”

On some of the IEEE committees where she serves, she is the only woman of color, but she says she has not faced any discrimination—only respect.

“I feel comfortable and appreciated by the people and the communities I work with,” she says. “That motivates me to continue to do well and to touch lives positively. That’s what makes me so active in serving in IEEE: You’re appreciated and rewarded for your hard work.”

This article is part of our exclusive career advice series in partnership with the IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society.

With technological advancement and changing societal expectations, the concept of work-life balance has become an elusive goal for many, particularly within the engineering community. The drive to remain continuously engaged with work, the pressure to achieve perfection, and the challenge of juggling work and personal responsibilities have created a landscape where professional and personal spheres are in constant negotiation.

This article covers several factors that can disrupt work-life balance, with recommendations on how to address them.

The myth of urgency

In an era dominated by instant communication via email and text messages, the expectation to respond quickly has led to an illusion of urgency. The perpetual state of constant alertness blurs the distinction between what’s urgent and what isn’t.

Recognizing that not every email message warrants an immediate response is the first step in deciding what’s important. By prioritizing responses based on actual importance, individuals can reclaim control over their time, reduce stress, and foster a more manageable workload.

Throughout my career, I have found that setting specific times to check and respond to email helps avoid distractions throughout the day. There are programs that prioritize email and classify tasks based on its urgency and importance.

Another suggestion is to unsubscribe from unnecessary newsletters and set up filters that move unwanted email to a specific folder or the trash before it reaches your inbox.

Cutting back the endless workday

Today’s work environment, characterized by remote access and flexible hours, has extended the workday beyond a set schedule and has encroached on personal time. The situation is particularly prevalent among engineers committed to solving complex problems, leading to a scenario where work is a constant companion—which leaves little room for personal pursuits or time with family.

A balanced life is healthier and more sustainable, and it enriches the quality of our work and our relationships with those we love.

Establishing clear boundaries between work and personal time is essential. One way to do so is to communicate clear working hours to your manager, coworkers, and clients. You can use tools such as email autoresponders and do-not-disturb modes to reinforce your boundaries.

It’s important to recognize that work, while integral, is only one aspect of life.

The quest for perfectionism

The pursuit of perfection is a common trap for many professionals, leading to endless revisions and dissatisfaction with one’s work. The quest not only wastes an inordinate amount of time. It also detracts from the quality of life.

Embracing the philosophy that “it doesn’t have to be perfect” can liberate individuals from the trap. By aiming for excellence rather than perfection, one can achieve high standards of work while also making time for personal growth and happiness.

To help adopt such a mindset, practice setting realistic standards for different tasks by asking yourself what level of quality is truly necessary for each. Allocating a fixed amount of time to specific tasks can help prevent endless tweaking.

The necessity of exercise

Physical activity often takes a back seat to busy schedules and is often viewed as negotiable or secondary to work and family responsibilities. Exercise, however, is a critical component for maintaining mental and physical health. Integrating regular physical activity into one’s routine is not just beneficial; it’s essential for maintaining balance and enhancing your quality of life.

One way to ensure you are taking care of your health is to schedule exercise as a nonnegotiable activity in your calendar, similar to important meetings or activities. Also consider integrating physical activity into your daily routine, such as riding a bicycle to work, walking to meetings, and taking short strolls around your office building. If you work from home, take a walk around your neighborhood.

Sleep boosts productivity

Contrary to the glorification of overwork and sleep deprivation in some professional circles, sleep is a paramount factor in maintaining high levels of productivity and creativity. Numerous studies have shown that adequate sleep—seven to nine hours for most adults—enhances cognitive functions, problem-solving skills, and memory retention.

For engineers and others in professions where innovation and precision are paramount, neglecting sleep can diminish the quality of work and the capacity for critical thinking.

Sleep deprivation has been linked to a variety of health issues including increased risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and stress-related conditions.

Prioritizing sleep is not a luxury but a necessity for those aiming to excel in their career while also enjoying a fulfilling personal life.

Begin your bedtime routine at the same time each night to cue your body that it’s time to wind down. For a smooth transition to sleep, try adjusting lighting, reducing noise, and engaging in relaxing activities such as reading or listening to calm music.

Relaxation is the counterbalance to stress

Relaxation is crucial for counteracting the effects of stress and preventing burnout. Techniques such as meditation, deep-breathing exercises, yoga, and engaging in leisure activities that bring joy can significantly reduce stress levels, thereby enhancing emotional equilibrium and resilience.

Spending time with friends and family is another effective relaxation strategy. Social interactions with loved ones can provide emotional support, happiness, and a sense of belonging, all of which are essential for limiting stress and promoting mental health. The social connections help build a support network that can serve as a buffer against life’s challenges, providing a sense of stability and comfort.

Allow yourself to recharge and foster a sense of fulfillment by allocating time each week to pursue interests that enrich your life. Also consider incorporating relaxation techniques in your daily routine, such as mindfulness meditation or short walks outdoors.

Guarding time and energy

In the quest for balance, learning to say no and ruthlessly eliminating activities that do not add value are invaluable skills. Make conscious choices about how to spend your time and energy, focusing on activities that align with personal and professional priorities. By doing so, individuals can protect their time, reduce stress, and dedicate themselves more fully to meaningful pursuits.

Practice assertiveness in communicating your capacity and boundaries to others. When asked to take on an additional task, it’s important to consider the impact on your current priorities. Don’t hesitate to decline politely if the new task doesn’t align.

Challenges for women

When discussing work-life balance, it’s essential to acknowledge the specific challenges faced by women, particularly in engineering. They are often expected to manage household duties, childcare, and their professional responsibilities while also supporting their partner’s career goals.

It can be especially challenging for women who strive to meet high standards at work and home. Recognizing and addressing their challenges is crucial in fostering an environment that supports balance for everyone.

One way to do that is to have open discussions with employers about the challenges and the support needed in the workplace and at home. Advocating for company policies that support work-life balance, such as a flexible work schedule and parental leave, is important.

Achieving a healthy work-life balance in the engineering profession—and indeed in any high-pressure field—is an ongoing process that requires self-awareness, clear priorities, and the courage to set boundaries.

It involves a collective effort by employers and workers to recognize the value of balance and to create a culture that supports it.

By acknowledging the illusion of constant urgency, understanding our limitations, and addressing the particular challenges faced by women, we can move toward a future where professional success and personal fulfillment are mutually reinforcing.

A balanced life is healthier and more sustainable, and it enriches the quality of our work and our relationships with those we love.

Schoolchildren around the world are told that they have the potential to be great, often with the cheery phrase: “The sky’s the limit!”

Gladys West took those words literally.

While working for four decades as a mathematician and computer programmer at the U.S. Naval Proving Ground (now the Naval Surface Warfare Center) in Dahlgren, Va., she prepared the way for a satellite constellation in the sky that became an indispensable part of modern life: the Global Positioning System, or GPS.

The second Black woman to ever work at the proving ground, West led a group of analysts who used satellite sensor data to calculate the shape of the Earth and the orbital routes around it. Her meticulous calculations and programming work established the flight paths now used by GPS satellites, setting the stage for navigation and positioning systems on which the world has come to rely.

For decades, West’s contributions went unacknowledged. But she has begun receiving overdue recognition. In 2018 she was inducted into the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame. In 2021 the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences presented her its Webby Lifetime Achievement Award, while the U.K. Royal Academy of Engineering gave her the Prince Philip Medal, the organization’s highest individual honor.

West was presented the 2024 IEEE President’s Award for “mathematical modeling and development of satellite geodesy models that played a pivotal role in the development of the Global Positioning System.” The award is sponsored by IEEE.

How the “hidden figure” overcame barriers

West’s path to becoming a technology professional and an IEEE honoree was an unlikely one. Born in 1930 in Sutherland, Va., she grew up working on her family’s farm. To supplement the family’s income, her mother worked at a tobacco factory and her father was employed by a railroad company.

Physical toil in the hot sun from daybreak until sundown with paltry financial returns, West says, made her determined to do something other than farming.

Every day when she ventured into the fields to sow or harvest crops with her family, her thoughts were on the little red schoolhouse beyond the edge of the farm. She recalls gladly making the nearly 5-kilometer trek from her house, through the woods and over streams, to reach the one-room school.

She knew that postsecondary education was her ticket out of farm life, so throughout her school years she made sure she was a standout student and a model of focus and perseverance.

Her parents couldn’t afford to pay for her college education, but as valedictorian of her high school class, she earned a full-tuition scholarship from the state of Virginia. Money she earned as a babysitter paid for her room and board.

West decided to pursue a degree in mathematics at Virginia State College (now Virginia State University), a historically Black school in Petersburg.

At the time, the field was dominated by men. She earned a bachelor’s degree in the subject in 1952 and became a schoolteacher in Waverly, Va. After two years in the classroom, she returned to Virginia State to pursue a master’s degree in mathematics, which she earned in 1955.

Gladys West at her desk, meticulously crunching numbers manually in the era before computers took over such tasks.Gladys West

Setting the groundwork for GPS

West began her career at the Naval Proving Ground in early 1956. She was hired as a mathematician, joining a cadre of workers who used linear algebra, calculus, and other methods to manually solve complex problems such as differential equations. Their mathematical wizardry was used to handle trajectory analysis for ships and aircraft as well as other applications.

She was one of four Black employees at the facility, she says, adding that her determination to prove the capability of Black professionals drove her to excel.

As computers were introduced into the Navy’s operations in the 1960s, West became proficient in Fortran IV. The programming language enabled her to use the IBM 7030—the world’s fastest supercomputer at the time—to process data at an unprecedented rate.

Because of her expertise in mathematics and computer science, she was appointed director of projects that extracted valuable insights from satellite data gathered during NASA missions. West and her colleagues used the data to create ever more accurate models of the geoid—the shape of the Earth—factoring in gravitational fields and the planet’s rotation.

One such mission was Seasat, which lasted from June to October 1978. Seasat was launched into orbit to test oceanographic sensors and gain a better understanding of Earth’s seas using the first space-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system, which enabled the first remote sensing of the Earth’s oceans.

SAR can acquire high-resolution images at night and can penetrate through clouds and rain. Seasat captured many valuable 2D and 3D images before a malfunction caused the satellite to be taken down.

Enough data was collected from Seasat for West’s team to refine existing geodetic models to better account for gravity and magnetic forces. The models were important for precisely mapping the Earth’s topography, determining the orbital routes that would later be used by GPS satellites, as well as documenting the spatial relationships that now let GPS determine exactly where a receiver is.

In 1986 she published the “Data Processing System Specifications for the GEOSAT Satellite Radar Altimeter” technical report. It contained new calculations that could make her geodetic models more accurate. The calculations were made possible by data from the radio altimeter on the GEOSAT, a Navy satellite that went into orbit in March 1985.

West’s career at Dahlgren lasted 42 years. By the time she retired in 1998, all 24 satellites in the GPS constellation had been launched to help the world keep time and handle navigation. But her role was largely unknown.

A model of perseverance

Neither an early bout of imposter syndrome nor the racial tensions that were an everyday element of her work life during the height of the Civil Rights Movement were able to knock her off course, West says.

In the early 1970s, she decided that her career advancement was not proceeding as smoothly as she thought it should, so she decided to go to graduate school part time for another degree. She considered pursuing a doctorate in mathematics but realized, “I already had all the technical credentials I would ever need for my work for the Navy.” Instead, to solidify her skills as a manager, she earned a master’s degree in 1973 in public administration from the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

After retiring from the Navy, she earned a doctorate in public administration in 2000 from Virginia Tech. Although she was recovering from a stroke at the time that affected her physical abilities, she still had the same drive to pursue an education that had once kept her focused on a little red schoolhouse.

A formidable legacy

West’s contributions have had a lasting impact on the fields of mathematics, geodesy, and computer science. Her pioneering efforts in a predominantly male and racially segregated environment set a precedent for future generations of female and minority scientists.

West says her life and career are testaments to the power of perseverance, skill, and dedication—or “stick-to-it-iveness,” to use her parlance. Her story continues to inspire people who strive to push boundaries. She has shown that the sky is indeed not the limit but just the beginning.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the authors and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum, The Institute, or IEEE.

Many in the civilian artificial intelligence community don’t seem to realize that today’s AI innovations could have serious consequences for international peace and security. Yet AI practitioners—whether researchers, engineers, product developers, or industry managers—can play critical roles in mitigating risks through the decisions they make throughout the life cycle of AI technologies.

There are a host of ways by which civilian advances of AI could threaten peace and security. Some are direct, such as the use of AI-powered chatbots to create disinformation for political-influence operations. Large language models also can be used to create code for cyberattacks and to facilitate the development and production of biological weapons.

Other ways are more indirect. AI companies’ decisions about whether to make their software open-source and in which conditions, for example, have geopolitical implications. Such decisions determine how states or nonstate actors access critical technology, which they might use to develop military AI applications, potentially including autonomous weapons systems.

AI companies and researchers must become more aware of the challenges, and of their capacity to do something about them.

Change needs to start with AI practitioners’ education and career development. Technically, there are many options in the responsible innovation toolbox that AI researchers could use to identify and mitigate the risks their work presents. They must be given opportunities to learn about such options including IEEE 7010: Recommended Practice for Assessing the Impact of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems on Human Well-being, IEEE 7007-2021: Ontological Standard for Ethically Driven Robotics and Automation Systems, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s AI Risk Management Framework.

If education programs provide foundational knowledge about the societal impact of technology and the way technology governance works, AI practitioners will be better empowered to innovate responsibly and be meaningful designers and implementers of regulations.

What Needs to Change in AI Education

Responsible AI requires a spectrum of capabilities that are typically not covered in AI education. AI should no longer be treated as a pure STEM discipline but rather a transdisciplinary one that requires technical knowledge, yes, but also insights from the social sciences and humanities. There should be mandatory courses on the societal impact of technology and responsible innovation, as well as specific training on AI ethics and governance.

Those subjects should be part of the core curriculum at both the undergraduate and graduate levels at all universities that offer AI degrees.

If education programs provide foundational knowledge about the societal impact of technology and the way technology governance works, AI practitioners will be empowered to innovate responsibly and be meaningful designers and implementers of AI regulations.

Changing the AI education curriculum is no small task. In some countries, modifications to university curricula require approval at the ministry level. Proposed changes can be met with internal resistance due to cultural, bureaucratic, or financial reasons. Meanwhile, the existing instructors’ expertise in the new topics might be limited.

An increasing number of universities now offer the topics as electives, however, including Harvard, New York University, Sorbonne University, Umeå University, and the University of Helsinki.

There’s no need for a one-size-fits-all teaching model, but there’s certainly a need for funding to hire dedicated staff members and train them.

Adding Responsible AI to Lifelong Learning

The AI community must develop continuing education courses on the societal impact of AI research so that practitioners can keep learning about such topics throughout their career.

AI is bound to evolve in unexpected ways. Identifying and mitigating its risks will require ongoing discussions involving not only researchers and developers but also people who might directly or indirectly be impacted by its use. A well-rounded continuing education program would draw insights from all stakeholders.

Some universities and private companies already have ethical review boards and policy teams that assess the impact of AI tools. Although the teams’ mandate usually does not include training, their duties could be expanded to make courses available to everyone within the organization. Training on responsible AI research shouldn’t be a matter of individual interest; it should be encouraged.

Organizations such as IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery could play important roles in establishing continuing education courses because they’re well placed to pool information and facilitate dialogue, which could result in the establishment of ethical norms.

Engaging With the Wider World

We also need AI practitioners to share knowledge and ignite discussions about potential risks beyond the bounds of the AI research community.

Fortunately, there are already numerous groups on social media that actively debate AI risks including the misuse of civilian technology by state and nonstate actors. There are also niche organizations focused on responsible AI that look at the geopolitical and security implications of AI research and innovation. They include the AI Now Institute, the Centre for the Governance of AI, Data and Society, the Distributed AI Research Institute, the Montreal AI Ethics Institute, and the Partnership on AI.

Those communities, however, are currently too small and not sufficiently diverse, as their most prominent members typically share similar backgrounds. Their lack of diversity could lead the groups to ignore risks that affect underrepresented populations.

What’s more, AI practitioners might need help and tutelage in how to engage with people outside the AI research community—especially with policymakers. Articulating problems or recommendations in ways that nontechnical individuals can understand is a necessary skill.

We must find ways to grow the existing communities, make them more diverse and inclusive, and make them better at engaging with the rest of society. Large professional organizations such as IEEE and ACM could help, perhaps by creating dedicated working groups of experts or setting up tracks at AI conferences.

Universities and the private sector also can help by creating or expanding positions and departments focused on AI’s societal impact and AI governance. Umeå University recently created an AI Policy Lab to address the issues. Companies including Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI have established divisions or units dedicated to such topics.

There are growing movements around the world to regulate AI. Recent developments include the creation of the U.N. High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence and the Global Commission on Responsible Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain. The G7 leaders issued a statement on the Hiroshima AI process, and the British government hosted the first AI Safety Summit last year.

The central question before regulators is whether AI researchers and companies can be trusted to develop the technology responsibly.

In our view, one of the most effective and sustainable ways to ensure that AI developers take responsibility for the risks is to invest in education. Practitioners of today and tomorrow must have the basic knowledge and means to address the risk stemming from their work if they are to be effective designers and implementers of future AI regulations.

Authors’ note: Authors are listed by level of contributions. The authors were brought together by an initiative of the U.N. Office for Disarmament Affairs and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute launched with the support of a European Union initiative on Responsible Innovation in AI for International Peace and Security.

Being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder as a child hasn’t hindered computer engineer Roberto Moreno from reaching his goals. ASD, a neurodevelopmental disorder, impacts how a person behaves, learns, perceives the world, and socializes with others. Moreno, an IEEE member, is a technical leader for AgenciaSur, a Chilean company that develops tools to help businesses digitize their operations. He manages six employees at the Santiago location.

Although Moreno didn’t have a mentor, he says, many people throughout his life assisted him, whether it was with schoolwork or navigating social situations. They also helped him with the mental health issues the struggles prompted.

“The people who made an impact on me,” he says, “helped me fight for the vision I had for my life so as to not fall into the depths of depression and anxiety.”

Roberto Moreno

Employer

AgenciaSur, in Santiago, Chile

Title

Technical leader

Member grade

Member

Alma mater

Universidad Andrés Bello in Santiago

He says that’s why he wants to build a support system for neurodivergent engineers and students, especially those living in South America. The term neurodivergent is used to describe people whose brains process information atypically, including those with ASD, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and dyslexia. There is a stigma surrounding such conditions in many countries, Moreno says, leading to discrimination at school, work, and professional organizations.

Moreno helps engineering students and young professionals learn how to overcome challenges so they don’t leave the profession. He participates in mentorship programs including the one on IEEE Collabratec, sharing his experiences and helping his mentees navigate challenging situations.

Facing his biggest challenges

Moreno’s success didn’t come easily. Growing up, he faced quite a few challenges including learning how to read, write, and speak English. Moreno is extremely literal and finds it hard to understand sarcasm, as is common among people with ASD.

That made learning a new language more challenging.

In Spanish, he notes, “the graphemes and phonemes differ greatly from Germanic ones.” Graphemes are individual letters or groups of letters that represent speech sounds. Phonemes are the speech sounds that make up words. The difference in graphemes and phonemes makes it difficult to quickly make the connection between words and their meaning in Germanic languages, Moreno says.

He also struggles with the “go with the flow” attitude. He prefers to follow the rules and social norms at all times.

“This caused people to treat me differently,” he says.

When Moreno didn’t know or recognize what was causing his discomfort, it would drain him emotionally, he says. But if he never tried to understand the causes, he says, he wouldn’t have achieved his goals.

“Experiencing things that are out of my comfort zone has led to a lot of personal growth,” he says. “For example, if I had been influenced by people who discriminated against me, I would not feel comfortable being interviewed by The Institute.”

Tips for staying organized and mentally healthy

Having difficulty with being organized is common in people with autism, Moreno says.

Students especially find it difficult to manage their time. Moreno suggests they use programs such as Kanban and Pomofocus to create to-do lists and track the status of their homework and other projects.

Making time for oneself—to play a video game, say, or exercise—is necessary, he says. It’s especially important for students who are easily overwhelmed by their environment, such as bright lights in a classroom, a room that’s too hot or cold, or a place with many loud noises. Setting aside time for hobbies also can help prevent meltdowns, which are common for people with ASD when their nervous system is overloaded.

Recognizing employees’ needs

It’s important for employers to understand that some neurodivergent employees can become intensely focused on activities, causing them to lose track of time and their surroundings, Moreno says. He suggests that managers split large projects into multiple tasks. So-called atomic tasks can make an assignment more manageable and less overwhelming. The method also allows employees to better manage their time.

Managers should also accommodate their employees’ needs, Moreno says.

“For example, one of my team members was having personal difficulties, and because of this he often completed his tasks late at night,” he says. “When assigning him a project, I needed to take this into consideration and estimate how long it would take him to complete it so as to not cause him more stress.”

How IEEE can support neurodivergent members

Being part of IEEE’s technical communities has been invaluable to Moreno’s professional success, he says. As an IEEE Computer Society member, he learned how to be more positive, see the humor in difficult situations, and not be as emotionally affected.

“I have learned a lot from more experienced technical professionals,” he says, “and I continue to grow as an engineer.”

There are ways IEEE can better support neurodivergent members, he says, including creating programs in collaboration with neurodivergent people. For example, he says, IEEE Women in Engineering could expand its Student-Teacher and Research Engineer/Scientist (STAR) program, which connects preuniversity girls with an engineer or scientist to encourage them to pursue a STEM career. The initiative, he says, could add a category specifically for neurodivergent students, enabling them to be mentored by a neurodivergent engineer or scientist.

Moreno suggests that IEEE streamline its proposal process for new projects, including keeping a record of what proposals were accepted or rejected and why. The feedback would help IEEE volunteers replicate successful proposals when writing their own, he says.

IEEE also could update the wording of its bylaws to prevent arbitrary interpretations. Neurodivergent people are likely to miss linguistic subtleties, sarcasm, and irony, he notes. They need regulations to be clear and direct so they can better comply with the rules and use the appropriate terms with other members. The wording in the IEEE Code of Ethics, he says, is a good example of a document that avoids arbitrary discriminatory language.

The benefits of an IEEE membership

The most important member benefit is the networking opportunities, Moreno says. “Without IEEE I would not have been able to meet and work with talented engineers and members such as Tania Quiel, Fernando Boucher, Nita Patel, and others,” he says.

Another benefit is the leadership training he received from participating in the IEEE Volunteer Leadership Training Program. The IEEE Member and Geographic Activities program provides members with resources and an overview of the organization, including its culture and mission.

“VoLT strengthened my soft skills and encouraged me to continue to work towards achieving my professional goals,” he says.

Unlike most people who encounter the IEEE-USA MOVE (Mobile Outreach VEhicle) emergency relief truck, Ananya Yanduru wasn’t a survivor of a natural disaster who needed to charge her cellphone or access the Internet. Instead, the 16-year-old got a guided tour of the truck on the grounds of her high school. She had requested MOVE visit Canyon Crest Academy, in San Diego, so she and her classmates could learn about the technology it houses.

The vehicle is equipped with satellite Internet access and IP phone service. MOVE can charge up to 100 cellphones simultaneously. It also has a mobile television for tracking storms, as well as radios for communications. A generator and three solar panels on the roof power the technology.

When it’s not deployed to help in disaster recovery, the vehicle stops at venues so its team can provide guided tours, educating people about ways technology helps during disasters.

Yanduru spotted the truck in June 2023 when it was parked at the San Diego Convention Center. She was there to accompany her father, an IEEE senior member, to a conference.

“I saw that the truck had traveled across the United States to help with hurricanes, be there for disaster relief, and work with the American Red Cross,” she says. “I thought that was a big deal.” MOVE’s volunteers often coordinate their disaster-relief efforts with the Red Cross.

Tours were over for the day, but that didn’t stop her. She was so determined to explore the vehicle that as soon as she got home she went to the MOVE website and requested a visit to her school. It showed up a few weeks later.

Yanduru was most interested in its communications system. She was impressed that the vehicle had its own Wi-Fi network, she says.

“I really liked how the IEEE-USA MOVE truck is able to establish such a strong communication system in a disaster area,” she says. “The radio engineering communication part really clicked with me.”

The vehicle was a big hit at her school, Yanduru says. More than 70 students and teachers toured it. Some of the students brought their family and friends.

Qualcomm’s devices inspired an interest in engineering

Yanduru is no stranger to engineering or technology. She comes from a family of engineers and is a member of her school’s radio engineering, coding, and 3D printing clubs.

Her father, electrical engineer Naveen Yanduru, is vice president and general manager of Renesas Electronics, in San Diego. Her mother, electrical engineer Arunasree Parsi, has worked as a computer-aided design engineer for Qualcomm and other semiconductor companies. Parsi is now president and CEO of Kaleidochip, also in San Diego.

“I really liked how the IEEE-USA MOVE truck is able to establish such a strong communication system in a disaster area.”

Yanduru says her mother sparked her passion for technology. When the girl was a youngster, the two visited the Qualcomm Museum, which displays the company’s modems, chips, tracking systems, and other products.

“I got interested in engineering from looking at those devices and seeing how engineering could be applied to so many different aspects of the world and used in so many fields,” she says.

Her parents support her interest in engineering because “it’s something that we can talk about,” she says. “I always feel open to discussing technology with them because they have so much knowledge in the field.”

Students and teachers from San Diego’s Canyon Crest Academy line up to tour the IEEE-USA MOVE truck during its stop at the high school.Ananya Yanduru

Participating in ham radio, 3D printing, and coding clubs

It’s no surprise Yanduru was interested in the MOVE’s communication system. She is a cofounder and copresident of her school’s radio engineering club, which has 10 members. It teaches students about topics they need to know to pass the amateur radio licensing test.

Yanduru is a licensed amateur radio operator. Her call sign is K06BAM.

“Getting a license sounds cool to a lot of high school students,” she says, “so as the founders, we thought the club would get more interest if we showed them an easy way to get their ham radio license.”

Now that most members have a license, they decided to participate in other activities. They first chose NASA’s Radio JOVE. The citizen science project provides kits for building a simple radio telescope to conduct scientific analysis of planets, the Milky Way, and Earth-based radio emissions. The findings are then shared with radio observatories via the Internet.

The club’s students plan to build their telescope during summer break, Yanduru says, adding that in the next school year they’ll conduct experiments about energy coming from Jupiter, then will send their results to NASA for analysis.

Yanduru also helped establish the school’s 3D printing club. She teaches club members how to print. The six members also help teachers repair the printers.

Another hobby of hers is writing code. She is secretary of the academy’s Girls Who Code club, which has about 20 members, not including the classmates they teach. The program aims to increase the number of women in the tech field by teaching coding.

She is sharing the knowledge she gains from the club as a volunteer teaching assistant for the League of Amazing Programmers. The San Diego–based nonprofit after-school program trains students in grades 5 to 12 on Java and Python.

“I really like being part of all the clubs,” she says, “because they use different aspects of engineering. For 3D, you really get to see the creative and the physical aspects. Radio is obviously more abstract. And coding is fun.”

Yanduru is still a few years away from attending college, but she says she plans to pursue an engineering degree. Choosing which field is a dilemma, she says.

“There’s a lot of things in electrical engineering and computer engineering that I find interesting,” she says. “I’ll definitely be studying something in one of those fields.”

The IEEE Board of Directors shapes the future direction of IEEE and is committed to ensuring IEEE remains a strong and vibrant organization—serving the needs of its members and the engineering and technology community worldwide—while fulfilling the IEEE mission of advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.

This article features IEEE Board of Directors members Deepak Mathur, Saifur Rahman, and Aylin Yener.

IEEE Senior Member Deepak Mathur

Vice President, Member and Geographic Activities

Jaideep

Mathur has nearly 40 years of professional experience in electronics and telecommunications at India’s premier public sector oil and gas company, engaged in the exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons. During his tenure, most recently as chief general manager, he successfully led multidisciplinary teams through significant IT and communications projects. These include supervisory control and data acquisition, online and real-time monitoring systems, WiMax-based broadband wireless access systems, and GPS/GSM-based vehicle tracking systems. Mathur also has experience managing and working on high-tech oil well logging systems, which analyze the properties of the subsurface to explore the possibility of hydrocarbons.

Mathur has served in many IEEE leadership roles at the region, section, council, and global levels. A member of the IEEE Industry Applications Society, the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology, he was the director of IEEE Region 10 (Asia and Pacific), a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (2013–2015), and chair of the IEEE India Council (2015–2016). In his current role with IEEE Member and Geographic Activities, Mathur focuses on supporting IEEE members, as well as developing IEEE membership recruitment and retention strategies.

Mathur is a member of IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu, the honor society. Throughout his IEEE journey, he has received several prestigious recognitions, including the Region 10 Outstanding Volunteer Award, the MGA Achievement Award, and the India Council Lifetime Achievement Award.

Mathur is currently a professor of practice and a member of the academic council at Marwadi University, in Rajkot, India.

IEEE Life Fellow Saifur Rahman

2023 IEEE President

Chelsea Seeber

Rahman is the founding director of the Advanced Research Institute and the Center for Energy and the Global Environment at Virginia Tech, where he researches renewable energy, sensor integration, smart grids, and smart cities. His work promotes clean-tech solutions for climate sustainability, and his six-point solution to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the electric power sector is being implemented in varying degrees in more than 100 countries.

A prolific lecturer, Rahman has made more than 850 presentations at conferences and invited speaking engagements in more than 30 countries. His visionary and innovative leadership approaches and strategies have earned him global recognition. In 2020, he spoke at five different webinars in five countries on four continents in one day.

As the 2023 IEEE president, his main priorities were to position the organization as a force for change and to make it more relevant to technology professionals worldwide. Rahman feels that IEEE, as the world’s largest organization of technical professionals, has both the opportunity and the responsibility to address the causes of, mitigate the impact of, and adapt to climate change. His forward-thinking strategies led to the creation of the IEEE Climate Change website and helped foster collaboration among technology and engineering professionals, policymakers, and other organizations to foster a dialogue on sustainable energy policies and practices. Previously, Rahman served as the vice president of IEEE Publication Services and Products (2006) and president of the IEEE Power & Energy Society (2018 and 2019).

Rahman has published more than 160 journal papers with over 20,000 citations. He is the founding editor in chief of the IEEE Electrification Magazine and IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy. He has also received several IEEE recognitions, including the Power & Energy Society Service Award, PES Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award, Technical Activities Board Hall of Honor, and IEEE Millennium Medal.

IEEE Fellow Aylin Yener

Director, Division IX

Aylin Yener

Yener, an endowed chair professor at The Ohio State University College of Engineering, aims to connect the universe and everyone and everything in it by designing systems that ensure secure and reliable information transfer in a sustainable manner. Her work in communications, information theory, and artificial intelligence covers a wide range of system design topics, from network optimization to security and privacy of information to robust and safe machine-learning algorithms in networked settings.

Of particular interest to Yener is next-generation wireless communication and how to create an energy-neutral digital society. She also works to ensure digital connectivity for underserved populations and creating fair and private AI algorithms to aid human ingenuity.

Yener has been an active IEEE volunteer for more than two decades, with experience in membership, finances, publications, conferences, and outreach. She has served as president of the IEEE Information Theory Society(2020) and is an active member of the IEEE Signal Processing, IEEE Communications, and IEEE Vehicular Technology societies. As director of Division IX, she advocates for deeper cooperation among societies by sharing best practices and facilitating the cross-pollination of ideas.

Yener has been an IEEE distinguished lecturer and is currently the editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking. She has delivered more than 60 technical keynotes and invited lectures in the past 10 years. Yener is committed to a broader educational impact, having cofounded the IEEE North American School of Information Theory, which offers graduate students and postdoctoral researchers the opportunity to learn from leading experts. Yener’s IEEE recognitions include the Marconi Prize Paper Award, Communication Theory Technical Achievement Award, and Women in Communications Engineering Outstanding Achievement Award. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the Science Academy of Turkey.

Tsunenobu Kimoto, a professor of electronic science and engineering at Kyoto University, literally wrote the book on silicon carbide technology. Fundamentals of Silicon Carbide Technology, published in 2014, covers properties of SiC materials, processing technology, theory, and analysis of practical devices.

Kimoto, whose silicon carbide research has led to better fabrication techniques, improved the quality of wafers and reduced their defects. His innovations, which made silicon carbide semiconductor devices more efficient and more reliable and thus helped make them commercially viable, have had a significant impact on modern technology.

Tsunenobu Kimoto

Employer

Kyoto University

Title

Professor of electronic science and engineering

Member grade

Fellow

Alma mater

Kyoto University

For his contributions to silicon carbide material and power devices, the IEEE Fellow was honored with this year’s IEEE Andrew S. Grove Award, sponsored by the IEEE Electron Devices Society.

Silicon carbide’s humble beginnings

Decades before a Tesla Model 3 rolled off the assembly line with an SiC inverter, a small cadre of researchers, including Kimoto, foresaw the promise of silicon carbide technology. In obscurity they studied it and refined the techniques for fabricating power transistors with characteristics superior to those of the silicon devices then in mainstream use.

Today MOSFETs and other silicon carbide transistors greatly reduce on-state loss and switching losses in power-conversion systems, such as the inverters in an electric vehicle used to convert the battery’s direct current to the alternating current that drives the motor. Lower switching losses make the vehicles more efficient, reducing the size and weight of their power electronics and improving power-train performance. Silicon carbide–based chargers, which convert alternating current to direct current, provide similar improvements in efficiency.

But those tools didn’t just appear. “We had to first develop basic techniques such as how to dope the material to make n-type and p-type semiconductor crystals,” Kimoto says. N-type crystals’ atomic structures are arranged so that electrons, with their negative charges, move freely through the material’s lattice. Conversely, the atomic arrangement of p-type crystals’ contains positively charged holes.

Kimoto’s interest in silicon carbide began when he was working on his Ph.D. at Kyoto University in 1990.

“At that time, few people were working on silicon carbide devices,” he says. “And for those who were, the main target for silicon carbide was blue LED.

“There was hardly any interest in silicon carbide power devices, like MOSFETs and Schottky barrier diodes.”

Kimoto began by studying how SiC might be used as the basis of a blue LED. But then he read B. Jayant Baliga’s 1989 paper “Power Semiconductor Device Figure of Merit for High-Frequency Applications” in IEEE Electron Device Letters, and he attended a presentation by Baliga, the 2014 IEEE Medal of Honor recipient, on the topic.

“I was convinced that silicon carbide was very promising for power devices,” Kimoto says. “The problem was that we had no wafers and no substrate material,” without which it was impossible to fabricate the devices commercially.

In order to get silicon carbide power devices, “researchers like myself had to develop basic technology such as how to dope the material to make p-type and n-type crystals,” he says. “There was also the matter of forming high-quality oxides on silicon carbide.” Silicon dioxide is used in a MOSFET to isolate the gate and prevent electrons from flowing into it.

The first challenge Kimoto tackled was producing pure silicon carbide crystals. He decided to start with carborundum, a form of silicon carbide commonly used as an abrasive. Kimoto took some factory waste materials—small crystals of silicon carbide measuring roughly 5 millimeters by 8 mm­—and polished them.

He found he had highly doped n-type crystals. But he realized having only highly doped n-type SiC would be of little use in power applications unless he also could produce lightly doped (high purity) n-type and p-type SiC.

Connecting the two material types creates a depletion region straddling the junction where the n-type and p-type sides meet. In this region, the free, mobile charges are lost because of diffusion and recombination with their opposite charges, and an electric field is established that can be exploited to control the flow of charges across the boundary.

“Silicon carbide is a family with many, many brothers.”

By using an established technique, chemical vapor deposition, Kimoto was able to grow high-purity silicon carbide. The technique grows SiC as a layer on a substrate by introducing gasses into a reaction chamber.

At the time, silicon carbide, gallium nitride, and zinc selenide were all contenders in the race to produce a practical blue LED. Silicon carbide, Kimoto says, had only one advantage: It was relatively easy to make a silicon carbide p-n junction. Creating p-n junctions was still difficult to do with the other two options.

By the early 1990s, it was starting to become clear that SiC wasn’t going to win the blue-LED sweepstakes, however. The inescapable reality of the laws of physics trumped the SiC researchers’ belief that they could somehow overcome the material’s inherent properties. SiC has what is known as an indirect band gap structure, so when charge carriers are injected, the probability of the charges recombining and emitting photons is low, leading to poor efficiency as a light source.

While the blue-LED quest was making headlines, many low-profile advances were being made using SiC for power devices. By 1993, a team led by Kimoto and Hiroyuki Matsunami demonstrated the first 1,100-volt silicon carbide Schottky diodes, which they described in a paper in IEEE Electron Device Letters. The diodes produced by the team and others yielded fast switching that was not possible with silicon diodes.

“With silicon p-n diodes,” Kimoto says, “we need about a half microsecond for switching. But with a silicon carbide, it takes only 10 nanoseconds.”

The ability to switch devices on and off rapidly makes power supplies and inverters more efficient because they waste less energy as heat. Higher efficiency and less heat also permit designs that are smaller and lighter. That’s a big deal for electric vehicles, where less weight means less energy consumption.

Kimoto’s second breakthrough was identifying which form of the silicon carbide material would be most useful for electronics applications.

“Silicon carbide is a family with many, many brothers,” Kimoto says, noting that more than 100 variants with different silicon-carbon atomic structures exist.

The 6H-type silicon carbide was the default standard phase used by researchers targeting blue LEDs, but Kimoto discovered that the 4H-type has much better properties for power devices, including high electron mobility. Now all silicon carbide power devices and wafer products are made with the 4H-type.

Silicon carbide power devices in electric vehicles can improve energy efficiency by about 10 percent compared with silicon, Kimoto says. In electric trains, he says, the power required to propel the cars can be cut by 30 percent compared with those using silicon-based power devices.

Challenges remain, he acknowledges. Although silicon carbide power transistors are used in Teslas, other EVs, and electric trains, their performance is still far from ideal because of defects present at the silicon dioxide–SiC interface, he says. The interface defects lower the performance and reliability of MOS-based transistors, so Kimoto and others are working to reduce the defects.

A career sparked by semiconductors

When Kimoto was an only child growing up in Wakayama, Japan, near Osaka, his parents insisted he study medicine, and they expected him to live with them as an adult. His father was a garment factory worker; his mother was a homemaker. His move to Kyoto to study engineering “disappointed them on both counts,” he says.

His interest in engineering was sparked, he recalls, when he was in junior high school, and Japan and the United States were competing for semiconductor industry supremacy.

At Kyoto University, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering, in 1986 and 1988. After graduating, he took a job at Sumitomo Electric Industries’ R&D center in Itami. He worked with silicon-based materials there but wasn’t satisfied with the center’s research opportunities.

He returned to Kyoto University in 1990 to pursue his doctorate. While studying power electronics and high-temperature devices, he also gained an understanding of material defects, breakdown, mobility, and luminescence.

“My experience working at the company was very valuable, but I didn’t want to go back to industry again,” he says. By the time he earned his doctorate in 1996, the university had hired him as a research associate.

He has been there ever since, turning out innovations that have helped make silicon carbide an indispensable part of modern life.

Growing the silicon carbide community at IEEE

Kimoto joined IEEE in the late 1990s. An active volunteer, he has helped grow the worldwide silicon carbide community.

He is an editor of IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, and he has served on program committees for conferences including the International Symposium on Power Semiconductor Devices and ICs and the IEEE Workshop on Wide Bandgap Power Devices and Applications.

“Now when we hold a silicon carbide conference, more than 1,000 people gather,” he says. “At IEEE conferences like the International Electron Devices Meeting or ISPSD, we always see several well-attended sessions on silicon carbide power devices because more IEEE members pay attention to this field now.”

Lynn Conway, codeveloper of very-large-scale integration, died on 9 June at the age of 86. The VLSI process, which creates integrated circuits by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip, revolutionized microchip design.

Conway, an IEEE Fellow, was transfeminine and was a transgender-rights activist who played a key role in updating the IEEE Code of Conduct to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.

She shared her experiences on a blog to help others considering or beginning to transition their gender identity. She also mentored many trans people through their transitioning.

“Lynn Conway’s example of engineering impact and personal courage has been a great source of inspiration for me and countless others,” Michael Wellman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, told the Michigan Engineering News website. Conway was a professor emerita at the university.

The profile of Conway below is based on an interview The Institute conducted with her in December.

Some engineers dream their pioneering technologies will one day earn them a spot in history books. But what happens when your contributions are overlooked because of your gender identity?

If you’re like Lynn Conway—who faced that dilemma—you fight back.

Conway helped develop very-large-scale integration: the process of creating integrated circuits by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip. VLSI chips are at the core of electronic devices used today. The technology provides processing power, memory, and other functionalities to smartphones, laptops, smartwatches, televisions, and household appliances.

She and her research partner Carver Mead developed VLSI in the 1970s while she was working at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, in California. Mead was an engineering professor at CalTech at the time. For years, Conway’s role was overlooked partly because she was a woman, she asserts, and partly because she was transfeminine.

Since coming out publicly in 1999, Conway has been fighting for her contributions to be recognized, and she’s succeeding. Over the years, the IEEE Fellow has been honored by a variety of organizations, most recently the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which inducted her last year almost 15 years after it recognized Mead.

From budding physicist to electrical engineer

Conway initially was interested in studying physics because of the role it played in World War II.

“After the war ended, physicists became famous for blowing up the world in order to save it,” she says. “I was naive and saw physics as the source of all wisdom. I went off to MIT, not fully understanding the subject I chose to major in.”

She took many electrical engineering courses because, she says, they allowed her to be creative. It was through those classes that she found her calling.

She left MIT in 1957, then earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia in 1962 and 1963. While at Columbia, she conducted an independent study under the guidance of Herb Schorr, an adjunct professor and a researcher at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. The study involved installing a list-processing language on the IBM 1620 computer, “which was the most arcane machine to attempt to do that on,” she says laughing. “It was a cool language that Maurice Wilkes from Cambridge had developed to experiment with self-compiling compilers.”

She must have made quite an impression on Schorr, she says, because after she earned her master’s degree, he recruited her to join him at the research center. While working on the advanced computing systems project there, she invented multiple-out-of-order dynamic instruction scheduling, a technique that allows a CPU to reorder instructions based on their availability and readiness instead of following the program order strictly.

That work led to the creation of the superscalar CPU, which manages multiple instruction pipelines to execute several instructions concurrently.

The company eventually transferred her to its offices in California’s Bay Area.

Although her career was thriving, Conway was struggling with gender dysphoria, the distress people experience when their gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth. In 1967 she moved forward with gender-affirming care “to resolve the terrible existential situation I had faced since childhood,” she says.

She notified IBM of her intention to transition, with the hope the company would allow her to do so quietly. Instead, IBM fired her, convinced that her transition would cause “extreme emotional distress in fellow employees,” she says. (In 2020 the company issued an apology for terminating her.)

After completing her transition, at the end of 1968 Conway began her career anew as a contract programmer. By 1971 she was working as a computer architect at Memorex in Silicon Valley. She joined the company in what she calls “stealth mode.” No one other than close family members and friends knew she was transfeminine. Conway was afraid of discrimination and losing her job again, she says. Because of her decision to keep her transition a secret, she says, she could not claim credit for the techniques she had invented at IBM Research because they were credited to the name she had been assigned at birth, her “dead name.”

She was recruited in 1975 to join Xerox PARC as a research fellow and manager of its VLSI system design group.

It was there that she made history.

Conway was recruited in 1975 to join Xerox PARC as a research fellow.Lynn Conway

Starting the Mead and Conway Revolution

Concerned with how Moore’s Law would affect the performance of microelectronics, the Advanced Research Project Agency (now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) created a coalition of companies and research universities, including PARC and CalTech, to improve microchip design. After Conway joined PARC’s VLSI system design group, she worked closely with Carver Mead on chip design. Mead, now an IEEE Life Fellow, is credited with coining the term Moore’s Law.

Making chips at the time involved manually designing transistors and connecting them with circuits. The process was time-consuming and error-prone.

“A whole bunch of different pieces of design were being done at different abstraction levels, including the basic architecture, the logic design, the circuit design, and the layout design—all by different people,” Conway said in a 2023 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing interview. “And the various people in the different layers passed the design down in kind of a paternalistic top-down system. The people at any one layer may have no clue what the people at the other levels in that system are doing or what they know.”

Conway and Mead decided the best way to address that communication problem was to use CAD tools to automate the process.

The two also introduced the structured-design method of creating chips. It emphasized high-level abstraction and modular design techniques such as logic gates and modules—which made the process more efficient and scalable.

Conway also created a simplified set of rules for chip design that enabled the integrated circuits to be numerically encoded, scaled, and reused as Moore’s Law advanced.

The method was so radical, she says, that it needed help catching on. Conway and Mead wrote Introduction to VLSI Systems to take the new concepts straight to the next generation of engineers and programmers. The textbook included the basics of structured designs and how to validate and verify them. Before its publication in 1980, Conway tested how well it explained the method by teaching the first VLSI course in 1978 at MIT.

The textbook was successful, becoming the foundational resource for teaching the technology. By 1983 it was being used by nearly 120 universities.

Conway and Mead’s work resulted in what is known as the Mead and Conway Revolution, enabling faster, smaller, and more powerful devices to be developed.

Throughout the 1980s, Conway and Mead were known as the dynamic duo that created VLSI. They received multiple joint awards including the Electronics magazine 1981 Award for Achievement, the University of Pennsylvania’s 1984 Pender Award, and the Franklin Institute’s 1985 Wetherill Medal.

Conway left Xerox PARC in 1983 to join DARPA as assistant director for strategic computing. She led planning of the strategic computing initiative, an effort to expand the technology base for intelligent-weapons systems.

Two years later she began her academic career at the University of Michigan as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science. She was the university’s associate dean of engineering and taught there until 1998, when she retired.

Becoming an activist

In 1999 Conway decided to come out as a transfeminine engineer, knowing that not only would her previous work be credited to her again, she says, but also that she could be a source of strength and inspiration for others like her.

In the 2000s Conway’s honors began to dry up, while Mead continued to receive awards for VLSI, including a 2002 U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

After publicly coming out, she spoke openly about her experience and lobbied to be credited for her work.

Some organizations, including IEEE, began to recognize Conway. The IEEE Computer Society awarded her its 2009 Computer Pioneer Award. She received the 2015 IEEE/RSE Maxwell Medal, which honors contributions that had an exceptional impact on the development of electronics and electrical engineering.

When Yifeng Chen was a teenager in Shantou, China, in the early 2000s, he saw a TV program that amazed him. The show highlighted rooftop solar panels in Germany, explaining that the panels generated electricity to power the buildings and even earned the owners money by letting them sell extra energy back to the electricity company.

Yifeng Chen

Employer

Trina Solar

Title

Assistant vice president of technology

Member Grade

Member

Alma Maters

Sun Yat-sen University, in Guangzhou, China, and Leibniz University Hannover, in Germany

An incredulous Chen marveled at not only the technology but also the economics. A power authority would pay its customers?

It sounded like magic: useful and valuable electricity extracted from simple sunlight. The wonder of it all has fueled his dreams ever since.

In 2013 Chen earned a Ph.D. in photovoltaic sciences and technologies, and today he’s assistant vice president of technology at China’s Trina Solar, a Changzhou-based company that is one of the largest PV manufacturers in the world. He leads the company’s R&D group, whose efforts have set more than two dozen world records for solar power efficiency and output.

For Chen’s contributions to the science and technology of photovoltaic energy conversion, the IEEE member received the 2023 IEEE Stuart R. Wenham Young Professional Award from the IEEE Electron Devices Society.

“I was quite surprised and so grateful” to receive the Wenham Award, Chen says. “It’s a very high-level recognition, and there are so many deserving experts from around the world.”

Trina Solar’s push for more efficient hardware

Today’s commercial solar panels typically achieve about 20 percent efficiency: They can turn one-fifth of captured sunlight into electricity. Chen’s group is trying to make the panels more efficient.

The group is focusing on optimizing solar cell designs, including the passivated emitter and rear cell (PERC), which is the industry standard for commodity solar panels.

Invented in 1983, PERCs are used today in nearly 90 percent of solar panels on the market. They incorporate coatings on the front and back to capture sunlight more effectively and to avoid losing energy, both at the surfaces and as the sunlight travels through the cell. The coatings, known as passivation layers, are made from materials such as silicon nitride, silicon dioxide, and aluminum oxide. The layers keep negatively charged free electrons and positively charged electron holes apart, preventing them from combining at the surface of the solar cell and wasting energy.

Chen and his team have developed several ways to boost the performance of PERC panels, hitting a record of 24.5 percent efficiency in 2022. One of the technologies is a multilayer antireflective coating that helps solar panels trap more light. They also created extremely fine metallization fingers—narrow lines on solar cells’ surfaces—to collect and transport the electric current and help capture more sunlight. And they developed an advanced method for laying the strips of conductive metal that run across the solar cell, known as bus bars.

Experts predict the maximum efficiency of PERC technology will be reached soon, topping out at about 25 percent.

IEEE Member Yifeng Chen displays an i-TOPCon solar module, which has a production efficiency of more than 23 percent and a power output of up to 720 watts.Trina Solar

“So the question is: How do we get solar cells even more efficient?” Chen says.

During the past few years he and his group have been working on tunnel oxide passivated contact (TOPCon) technology. A TOPCon cell uses a thin layer of “tunneling oxide” insulating material—typically silicon dioxide—which is applied to the solar cell’s surface. Similar to the passivation layers on PERC cells, the tunnel oxide stops free electrons and electron holes from combining and wasting energy.

In 2022 Trina created a TOPCon-type panel with a record 25.5 percent efficiency, and two months ago the company announced it had achieved a record 740.6 watts for a mass-produced TOPCon solar module. The latter was the 26th record Trina set for solar power–related efficiencies and outputs.

To achieve that record-breaking performance for their TOPCon panels, Chen and his team optimized the company’s manufacturing processes including laser-induced firing, in which a laser heats part of the solar cell and creates bonds between the metal contacts and the silicon wafer. The resulting connections are stronger and better aligned, enhancing efficiency.

“We’re trying to keep improving things to trap just a little bit more sunlight,” Chen says. “Gaining 1 or 2 percent more efficiency is huge. These may sound like very tiny increases, but at scale these small improvements create a lot of value in terms of economics, sustainability, and value to society.”

As the efficiency of solar cells rises and prices drop, Chen says, he expects solar power to continue to grow around the world. China currently leads the world in installed solar power capacity, accounting for about 40 percent of global capacity. The United States is a distant second, with 12 percent, according to a 2023 Rystad Energy report. The report predicts that China’s 500 gigawatts of solar capacity in 2023 is likely to exceed 1 terawatt by 2026.

“I’m inspired by using science to create something useful for human beings, and then driven by the pursuit for excellence,” Chen says. “We can always learn something new to make that change, improve that piece of technology, and get just that little bit better.”

Trained by solar-power pioneers

Chen attended Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, earning a bachelor’s degree in optics sciences and technologies in 2008. He stayed on to pursue a Ph.D. in photovoltaics sciences and technologies. His research was on high-efficiency solar cells made from wafer-based crystalline silicon. His adviser was Hui Shen, a leading PV professor and founder of the university’s Institute for Solar Energy Systems. Chen calls him “the first of three very important figures in my scientific career.”

In 2011 Chen spent a year as a Ph.D. student at Leibniz University Hannover, in Germany. There he studied under Pietro P. Altermatt, the second influential figure in his career.

Altermatt—a prominent silicon solar-cell expert who would later become principal scientist at Trina—advised Chen on his computational techniques for modeling and analyzing the behavior of 2D and 3D solar cells. The models play a key role in designing solar cells to optimize their output.

“Gaining 1 or 2 percent more efficiency is huge. These may sound like very tiny increases, but at scale, these small improvements create a lot of value in terms of economics, sustainability, and value to society.”

“Dr. Altermatt changed how I look at things,” Chen says. “In Germany, they really focus on device physics.”

After completing his Ph.D., Chen became a technical assistant at Trina, where he met the third highly influential person in his career: Pierre Verlinden, a pioneering photovoltaic researcher who was the company’s chief scientist.

At Trina, Chen quickly ascended through R&D roles. He has been the company’s assistant vice president of technology since 2023.

IEEE’s “treasure” trove of research

Chen joined IEEE as a student because he wanted to attend the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference, the longest-running event dedicated to photovoltaics, solar cells, and solar power.

The membership was particularly beneficial during his Ph.D. studies, he says, because he used the IEEE Xplore Digital Library to access archival papers.

“My work has certainly been inspired by papers I found via IEEE,” Chen says. “Plus, you end up clicking around and reading other work that isn’t related to your field but is so interesting.

“The publication repository is a treasure. It’s eye-opening to see what’s going on inside and outside of your industry, with new discoveries happening all the time.”

In my March column, I discussed the need for IEEE to increase its retention of younger members and its engagement with industry. Another one of my priorities is to increase the organization’s outreach to the broader public. I want people to know who we are and what we do.

To tell the story of IEEE is to share the impact our members, products, and services make around the globe. Did you know the top 50 patenting organizations worldwide cite IEEE publications three times more than those of any other publisher? And that IEEE publishes three of the top five publications on artificial intelligence, automation and control systems, and computer hardware and software? And that IEEE has an active portfolio of more than 1,100 standards in areas including the Internet, the metaverse, blockchain, sustainable and ethical design, and age-appropriate design for children’s digital services? I bet you didn’t know that IEEE members file more than 140,000 patents yearly and have won 21 Nobel Prizes thus far.

Our volunteers write, review, and publish much of the world’s technical literature and convene conferences on every conceivable technical topic. We also establish future directions communities on emerging technologies, pursue technical megatrends, provide opportunities for continued professional development, and develop and publish technology road maps on semiconductors and other important technologies.

Here are some of the ways IEEE is working to amplify its reach.

A powerful voice

As we navigate a new era in technology—one driven by AI and other disruptive technologies—the role of IEEE in advocating for pivotal policy issues in science and technology and engaging with policymakers and stakeholders cannot be understated.

As the world’s largest technical professional organization, IEEE is uniquely positioned to be the bridge among the experts who work in areas across IEEE’s organic technical breadth, including communications, computer science, power and energy, management, reliability, and ethics. IEEE can engage with the policymakers who devise the regulatory environment, and with the public who have varying levels of interaction and acceptance of emerging technologies. That includes collaborating with local technical communities worldwide, promoting outreach and educational activities to the public, and connecting with other organizations that are actively working in these spaces.

For example, in April I participated in the annual IEEE-USA Congressional Visits Day, which provides volunteers with the opportunity to interact with their senators and representatives. The event, a cornerstone in the technology and engineering community, serves as a platform to elevate the voices of engineers, scientists, mathematicians, researchers, educators, and technology executives. It plays a vital role in driving dialogue among engineering and technology professionals and policymakers to advocate for issues pertinent to IEEE members in the United States. It’s a unique opportunity for participants to engage directly with elected officials, fostering discussions on legislation and policies that shape the country’s technology landscape.

By empowering our voice in assisting with global public policymaking, we can reinforce IEEE’s position as the world’s trusted source for information and insights on emerging technology and trends in the marketplace. Each one of us can be an ambassador for the IEEE, telling people about how IEEE has helped us in our careers and benefits humanity.

Thinking outside the box

Other ways IEEE is expanding its reach is by participating at events one might not normally associate with the organization, as well as a new series of videos about members. One such event is the 2024 World Science Fiction Convention to be held in August in Glasgow. Many IEEE members, myself included, were inspired to become involved in technology by science fiction movies, TV shows, and books. As a young man, I dreamed of going into outer space to explore new worlds and discover new things. My interest in science fiction inspired me to want to understand the physical sciences and to learn how to use natural laws and logic to make things. My hope is that IEEE’s presence at such events can inspire the next generation to see the myriad of potential career and professional opportunities available to those interested in science, technology, and engineering.

I am also excited about a new series of videos being distributed to broadcast TV and cable stations, social media platforms, and news media outlets worldwide, targeting early career technology professionals, existing IEEE members, and the general public.

The international “IEEE Is Your Competitive Edge” videos tell stories of IEEE members and how their membership gave them a competitive edge. We selected individuals with diverse backgrounds for the videos, which are being shot on location around the globe. The goal of the videos is to encourage technologists to recognize IEEE as a vital part of their profession and career, as well as to see the advantages of membership and participating in IEEE activities. The benefits of this campaign are wide ranging and include raising IEEE’s public visibility and growing its membership. It is a way to tell our story and increase awareness of a great organization. These videos will also be available to IEEE organizational units, regions, and sections for their promotional efforts to use.

By celebrating the pride and prestige of our professions, we can help increase the public’s understanding of the contributions electrical, electronics, and computer engineers make to society. IEEE consistently and proudly demonstrates how its members improve the global community and have helped to build today’s technologically advanced world.

2024 IEEE President’s Award

At the IEEE Vision, Innovation, and Challenges Summit and Honors Ceremony, Dr. Gladys B. West was recognized as the recipient of the 2024 IEEE President’s Award for her trailblazing career in mathematics and her vital contributions to modern technology. Dr. West is known for her contributions to the mathematical modeling of the shape of the Earth. While working at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va., she conducted seminal work on satellite geodesy models that was pivotal in the development of the GPS. She worked at the center for 42 years, retiring in 1998.

As IEEE continues to enhance its reach, relevance, and value to an inclusive and global community, it was my honor to recognize such a technology giant who serves as a role model and inspiration for early career and young engineers and technologists, as well as those from underrepresented communities, to innovate to solve grand world challenges.

—Tom Coughlin

IEEE president and CEO

This article appears in the June 2024 print issue as “Amplifying IEEE’s Reach.”