Xello is an online, K-12 college, career and future readiness program that helps students of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds cultivate their self-knowledge and skill building while exploring options for life after high school.
Founded in 1995 by a team of recent college graduates struggling to understand their career options, Xello builds solutions for students to become future-ready by equipping them with the knowledge, skills and insights to make informed decisions and build actionable plans.
Starting in elementary school, Xello sparks curiosity and excitement around exploring current interests and future options in developmentally appropriate ways. The reflective activities help students build social-emotional skills like communication, problem-solving, and self-advocacy. For older students, a series of assessments helps them dig deeper into their interests, aptitudes, and aspirations.
Students with access to college and career readiness programs in elementary school have been shown to have better self-knowledge, be more engaged in school, and be better prepared to plan for a successful future. Students spend over 1 million hours using the Xello software each academic year, with 20% of logins happening outside of school hours, making Xello 14 times more engaging than the average education software program.
The content is available in English and Spanish and optimized for mobile, tablet, and desktop. It can be accessed via single sign-in and incorporated into Google Classrooms and Google Drive, making it easy for students to log in at the 9,000-plus schools across North America that use Xello. For these reasons and more, Xello is the Winner of a Cool Tool Award for “Best Career Planning Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more.
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 ChunChe “Lance” Fung, Eric Grigorian, and Christina Schober.
IEEE Senior Member ChunChe “Lance” Fung
Director, Region 10: Asia Pacific
Joanna Mai Yie Leung
Fung has worked in academia and provided industry consultancy services for more than 40 years. His research interests include applying artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational intelligence, and other techniques to solve practical problems. He has authored more than 400 publications in the disciplines of AI, computational intelligence, and related applications. Fung currently works on the ethical applications and social impacts of AI.
As chair of the
IEEE New Initiatives Committee, he established and promoted the US $1 Million Challenge Call for New Initiatives, which supports potential IEEE programs, services, or products that will significantly benefit members, the public, the technical community, or customers and could have a lasting impact on IEEE or its business processes.
Fung has left an indelible mark as a dedicated educator at
Singapore Polytechnic, Curtin University, and Murdoch University. He was appointed in 2015 as professor emeritus at Murdoch, and he takes pride in training the next generation of volunteers, leaders, teachers, and researchers in the Western Australian community. Fung received the IEEE Third Millennium Medal and the IEEE Region 10 Outstanding Volunteer Award.
IEEE Senior Member Eric Grigorian
Director, Region 3: Southern U.S. & Jamaica
Sean McNeil/GTRI
Grigorian has extensive experience leading international cross-domain teams that support the commercial and defense industries. His current research focuses on implementing model-based systems engineering, creating models that depict system behavior, interfaces, and architecture. His work has led to streamlined processes, reduced costs, and faster design and implementation of capabilities due to efficient modeling and verification. Grigorian holds two U.S. utility patents.
Grigorian has been an active volunteer with IEEE since his time as a student member at the
University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). He saw it as an excellent way to network and get to know people. He found his personality was suited for working within the organization and building leadership skills. During the past 43 years as an IEEE member, he has been affiliated with the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems (AESS), IEEE Computer, and IEEE Communications societies.
As Grigorian’s career has evolved, his involvement with IEEE has also increased. He has been the
IEEE Huntsville Section student activities chair, as well as vice chair, and chair. He also was the section’s AESS chair. He served as IEEE SoutheastCon chair in 2008 and 2019, and served on the IEEE Region 3 executive committee as area chair and conference committee chair, enhancing IEEE members’ benefits, engagement, and career advancement. He has significantly contributed to initiatives within IEEE, including promoting preuniversity science, technology, engineering, and mathematics efforts in Alabama.
Schober is an innovative engineer with a diverse design and manufacturing engineering background. With more than 40 years of experience, her career has spanned research, design, and manufacturing sensors for space, commercial, and military aircraft navigation and tactical guidance systems. She was responsible for the successful transition from design to production for groundbreaking programs including an integrated flight management system, the Stinger missile’s roll frequency sensor, and the designing of three phases of the DARPA atomic clock. She holds 17 U.S. patents and 24 other patents in the aerospace and navigation fields.
Schober started her career in the 1980s, at a time when female engineers were not widely accepted. The prevailing attitude required her to “stay tough,” she says, and she credits IEEE for giving her technical and professional support. Because of her experiences, she became dedicated to making diversity and inclusion systemic in IEEE.
Clark Johnson says he has wanted to be a scientist ever since he was 3. At age 8, he got bored with a telegraph-building kit he received as a gift and repurposed it into a telephone. By age 12, he set his sights on studying physics because he wanted to understand how things worked at the most basic level.
“I thought, mistakenly at the time, that physicists were attuned to the left ear of God,” Johnson says.
Clark Johnson
Employer
Wave Domain
Title
CFO
Member grade
Life Fellow
After graduating at age 19 with a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1950 from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, he was planning to go to graduate school when he got a call from the head of the physics section at 3M’s R&D laboratory with a job offer. Tempted by the promise of doing things with his own hands, Johnson accepted the role of physicist at the company’s facility in St. Paul, Minn. Thus began his more than seven-decade-long career as an electrical engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur—which continues to this day.
Johnson, an IEEE Life Fellow, is an active member of the IEEE Magnetics Society and served as its 1983–1984 president.
He went on to help found Wave Domain in Monson, Mass. Johnson and his Wave Domain collaborators have been granted six patents for their latest invention, a standing-wave storage (SWS) system that houses archival data in a low-energy-use, tamper-proof way using antiquated photography technology.
3M, HDTV, and a career full of color
3M turned out to be fertile ground for Johnson’s creativity.
“You could spend 15 percent of your time working on things you liked,” he says. “The president of the company believed that new ideas sort of sprung out of nothing, and if you poked around, you might come across something that could be useful.”
Johnson’s poking around led him to contribute to developing an audio tape cartridge and Scotchlite, the reflective film seen on roads, signs, and more.
“It was probably the most exciting year of my entire life,” Johnson says.
While on the science committee, he met Richard Jay Solomon, who was associate director of MIT’s Research Program on Communications Policy, testifying for the committee on video and telecom issues. Solomon’s background is diverse. He studied physics and electrical engineering in the early 1960s at Brooklyn Polytechnic and general science at New York University. Before becoming a research associate at MIT in 1969, he held a variety of positions. He ran a magazine about scientific photography, and he founded a business that provided consulting on urban planning and transportation. He authored four textbooks on transportation planning, three of which were published by the American Society of Civil Engineers. At the magazine, Solomon gained insights into arcane, long-forgotten 19th-century photographic processes that turned out to be useful in future inventions.
Johnson and Solomon bonded over their shared interest in trains. Johnson’s refurbished Pullman car has traveled some 850,000 miles across the continental U.S.Clark Johnson
Johnson and Solomon clicked over a shared interest in trains. At the time they met, Johnson owned a railway car that was parked in the District of Columbia’s Union Station, and he used it to move throughout North America, traveling some 850,000 miles before selling the car in 2019. Johnson and Solomon shared many trips aboard the refurbished Pullman car.
Now they are collaborators on a new method to store big data in a tamperproof, zero-energy-cost medium.
Conventional storage devices such as solid-state drives and hard disks take energy to maintain, and they might degrade over time, but Johnson says the technique he, Solomon, and collaborators developed requires virtually no energy and can remain intact for centuries under most conditions.
Long before collaborating on their latest project, Johnson and Solomon teamed up on another high-profile endeavor: the development of HDTV. The project arose through their work on the congressional science committee.
In the late 1980s, engineers in Japan were working on developing an analog high-definition television system.
“My boss on the science committee said, ‘We really can’t let the Japanese do this. There’s all this digital technology and digital computers. We’ve got to do this digitally,’” Johnson says.
That spawned a collaborative project funded by NASA and ARPA (the predecessor of modern-day DARPA). After Johnson’s tenure on the science committee ended, he and Solomon joined a team at MIT that participated in the collaboration. As they developed what would become the dominant TV technology, Johnson and Solomon became experts in optics. Working with Polaroid, IBM, and Philips in 1992, the team demonstrated the world’s first digital, progressive-scanned, high-definition camera at the annual National Association of Broadcastersconference.
A serendipitous discovery
Around 2000, Clark and Solomon, along with a new colleague, Eric Rosenthal, began working as independent consultants to NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense. Rosenthal had been a vice president of research and development at Walt Disney Imagineering and general manager of audiovisual systems engineering at ABC television prior to joining forces with Clark and Solomon.
While working on one DARPA-funded project, Solomon stumbled upon a page in a century-old optics textbook that caught his eye. It described a method developed by noted physicist Gabriel Lippmann for producing color photographs. Instead of using film or dyes, Lippmann created photos by using a glass plate coated with a specially formulated silver halide emulsion.
When exposed to a bright, sunlit scene, the full spectrum of light reflected off a mercury-based mirror coating on the back of the glass. It created standing waves inside the emulsion layer of the colors detected. The silver grains in the brightest parts of the standing wave became oxidized, as if remembering the precise colors they saw. (It was in stark contrast to traditional color photographs and television, which store only red, green, and blue parts of the spectrum.) Then, chemical processing turned the oxidized silver halide grains black, leaving the light waves imprinted in the medium in a way that is nearly impossible to tamper with. Lippmann received the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work.
Lippmann’s photography technique did not garner commercial success, because there was no practical way to duplicate the images or print them. And at the time, the emulsions needed the light to be extremely bright to be properly imprinted in the medium.
Nevertheless, Solomon was impressed with the durability of the resulting image. He explained the process to his colleagues, who recognized the possibility of using the technique to store information for archival purposes. Johnson saw Lippmann’s old photographs at the Museum for Photography, in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he noticed that the colors appeared clear and intense despite being more than a century old.
The silver halide method stuck with Solomon, and in 2013 he and Johnson returned to Lippmann’s emulsion photography technique.
“We got to talking about how we could take all this information we knew about color and use it for something,” Johnson says.
Data in space and on land
While Rosenthal was visiting the International Space Station headquarters in Huntsville, Ala., in 2013, a top scientist said, “‘The data stored on the station gets erased every 24 hours by cosmic rays,’” Rosenthal recalls. “‘And we have to keep rewriting the data over and over and over again.’” Cosmic rays and solar flares can damage electronic components, causing errors or outright erasures on hard disks and other traditional data storage systems.
Rosenthal, Johnson, and Solomon knew that properly processed silver halide photographs would be immune to such hazards, including electromagnetic pulses from nuclear explosions. The team examined Lippmann’s photographic emulsion anew.
Solomon’s son, Brian Solomon, a professional photographer and a specialist in making photographic emulsions, also was concerned about the durability of conventional dye-based color photographs, which tend to start fading after a few decades.
The team came up with an intriguing idea: Given how durable Lippmann’s photographs appeared to be, what if they could use a similar technique—not for making analog images but for storing digital data? Thus began their newest engineering endeavor: changing how archival data—data that doesn’t need to be overwritten but simply preserved and read occasionally—is stored.
The standing wave storage technique works by shining bright LEDs onto a specially formulated emulsion of silver grains in gelatin. The light reflects off the substrate layer (which could be air), and forms standing waves in the emulsion. Standing waves oxidize the silver grains at their peaks, and a chemical process turns the oxidized silver grains black, imprinting the pattern of colors into the medium. Wave Domain
Conventionally stored data sometimes is protected by making multiple copies or continuously rewriting it, Johnson says. The techniques require energy, though, and can be labor-intensive.
The amount of data that needs to be stored on land is also growing by leaps and bounds. The market for data centers and other artificial intelligence infrastructure is growing at an annual rate of 44 percent, according to Data Bridge Market Research. Commonly used hard drives and solid-state drives consume some power, even when they are not in use. The drives’ standby power consumption varies between 0.05 and 2.5 watts per drive. And data centers contain an enormous number of drives requiring tremendous amounts of electricity to keep running.
Johnson estimates that about 25 percent of the data held in today’s data centers is archival in nature, meaning it will not need to be overwritten.
The ‘write once, read forever’ technology
The technology Johnson, Solomon, and their collaborators have developed promises to overcome the energy requirements and vulnerabilities of traditional data storage for archival applications.
The design builds off of Lippmann’s idea. Instead of taking an analog photograph, the team divided the medium into pixels. With the help of emulsion specialist Yves Gentet, they worked to improve Lippmann’s emulsion chemistry, making it more sensitive and capable of storing multiple wavelengths at each pixel location. The final emulsion is a combination of silver halide and extremely hardened gelatin. Their technique now can store up to four distinct narrow-band, superimposed colors in each pixel.
The standing wave storage technique can store up to four colors out of a possible 32 at each pixel location. This adds up to an astounding storage capacity of 4.6 terabits (or roughly 300 movies) in the area of a single photograph. Wave Domain
“The textbooks say that’s impossible,” Solomon says, “but we did it, so the textbooks are wrong.”
For each pixel, they can choose four colors out of a possible 32 to store.
That amounts to more than 40,000 possibilities. Thus, the technique can store more than 40,000 bits (although the format need not be binary) in each 10-square-micrometer pixel, or 4.6 terabits in a 10.16 centimeter by 12.7 cm modified Lippmann plate. That’s more than 300 movies’ worth of data stored in a single picture.
To write on the SWS medium, the plate—coated with a thin layer of the specially formulated emulsion—is exposed to light from an array of powerful color LEDs.
That way, the entire plate is written simultaneously, greatly reducing the writing time per pixel.
The plate then gets developed through a chemical process that blackens the exposed silver grains, memorizing the waves of color it was exposed to.
Finally, a small charged-couplet-device camera array, like those used in cellphones, reads out the information. The readout occurs for the entire plate at once, so the readout rate, like the writing rate, is fast.
“The data that we read is coming off the plate at such a high bandwidth,” Solomon says. “There is no computer on the planet that can absorb it without some buffering.”
The entire memory cell is a sandwich of the LED array, the photosensitive plate, and the CCD. All the elements use off-the-shelf parts.
“We took a long time to figure out how to make this in a very inexpensive, reproducible, quick way,” Johnson says. “The idea is to use readily available parts.” The entire storage medium, along with its read/write infrastructure, is relatively inexpensive and portable.
To test the durability of their storage method, the team sent their collaborators at NASA some 150 samples of their SWS devices to be hung by astronauts outside the International Space Station for nine months in 2019. They then tested the integrity of the stored data after the SWS plates were returned from space, compared with another 150 plates stored in Rosenthal’s lab on the ground.
“There was absolutely zero degradation from nine months of exposure to cosmic rays,” Solomon says. Meanwhile, the plates on Rosenthal’s desk were crawling with bacteria, while the ISS plates were sterile. Silver is a known bactericide, though, so the colors were immune, Solomon says.
Their most recent patent, granted earlier this year, describes a method of storing data that requires no power to maintain when not actively reading or writing data. Team members say the technique is incorruptible: It is immune to moisture, solar flares, cosmic rays, and other kinds of radiation. So, they argue, it can be used both in space and on land as a durable, low-cost archival data solution.
Passing on the torch
The new invention has massive potential applications. In addition to data centers and space applications, Johnson says, scientific enterprises such as the Rubin Observatory being built in Chile, will produce massive amounts of archival data that could benefit from SWS technology.
“It’s all reference data, and it’s an extraordinary amount of data that’s being generated every week that needs to be kept forever,” Johnson says.
Johnson says, however, that he and his team will not be the ones to bring the technology to market: “I’m 94 years old, and my two partners are in their 70s and 80s. We’re not about to start a company.”
He is ready to pass on the torch. The team is seeking a new chief executive to head up Wave Domain, which they hope will continue the development of SWS and bring it to mass adoption.
Johnson says he has learned that people rarely know which new technologies will eventually have the most impact. Perhaps, though few people are aware of it now, storing big data using old photographic technology will become an unexpected success.
Lesley-Ann Knee credits her father for introducing her to the world of patents. He’s an engineer who specializes in application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and holds several patents on technologies he developed while working for Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft.
“I would hear stories of his experiences through the patent prosecution processes,” Knee says, which taught her about different kinds of patents, the importance of documentation, and using detailed language. She remembers one litigation battle over a patent that went on for years, which her father’s company lost because someone forgot to delete information in a patent claim.
Lesley-Ann Knee
Employer:
Husch Blackwell
Occupation:
Patent Engineer
Education:
Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, Colorado State University, in Fort Collins
Knee, an electrical engineer, now works as a patent engineer in the patent prosecution department at the law office of
Husch Blackwell, headquartered in Chicago. Under the supervision of patent attorneys, Knee helps with writing, filing, and managing patent applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
She is currently studying for the patent bar exam, which would qualify her to be a licensed patent agent, registered with the USPTO to help prepare and prosecute patent applications. Assuming she passes, she then intends to go to law school to become a patent attorney.
How to Become a Patent Engineer
Knee initially didn’t know what she wanted to study in college. Eventually she decided that an engineering degree offered diverse career opportunities, so she enrolled at
Colorado State University, in her hometown of Fort Collins. She followed in her father’s footsteps, specializing in ASIC design, but also studied power systems and semiconductor physics and minored in mathematics. In 2022 she worked as an intern in the engine research division of Honda Research and Development, in Raymond, Ohio, where she developed a data analysis tool to help with testing heat distribution in vehicles.
After graduating from Colorado State in 2022, she decided to get a job related to patents. From January to May, she worked part-time as a patent technical intern at the law firm of
Dorsey & Whitney, in Denver. “After learning about patents from the other side, I fell in love with the industry,” she says. Knee joined Husch Blackwell in June 2023.
She found that patent law has its quirky sides. One day her supervisor walked into one of the partner’s offices and saw the attorney “ripping apart a stuffed animal, guts everywhere,” she says. “[My] boss asked if the partner was okay. She explained that she had been pulled into a litigation case that depended entirely on the type of stitching used
inside the stuffed animals.”
What Can Be Patented?
Here is Knee’s primer on U.S. patents and her advice for first-time inventors filing patents with the USPTO. This information isn’t intended to provide legal advice, she notes, and every country has its own patent system, with different rules and regulations. For specifics or guidance about legal matters, she recommends contacting a patent practitioner.
Knee’s first piece of advice? Don’t be afraid of filing a patent application. Two out of three patents get approved by the USPTO, she says.
“If you disclose your invention publicly and do not file an application within one year, you could be barred from receiving a patent on that exact invention.”
To receive a patent, an invention must have utility—that is, it has to be useful for some purpose—and novelty, meaning that it’s not an obvious variation of what already exists, she says. It could be a machine, a manufacturing process, or a composition of matter (that is, a novel combination of natural elements that are mixed mechanically or chemically).
Some things that can’t be patented, she says, are atomic weapons, devices for illegal pursuits, methods of administering business, mathematical discoveries, and scientific principles—with the exception of devices and methods that make use of those principles.
The USPTO has recognized a growing interest in artificial intelligence over the past few years, and in 2024 it released
examples of AI patentability to give inventors guidance on the patentability of AI.“From my understanding, AI itself is not patentable,” Knee says. But using AI to invent something doesn’t necessarily make the invention unpatentable, she says.
An Overview of the Patent Process
The USPTO uses the “first to file” system for patent applications. “Whoever files an application first will have the best chance to patent an invention. Otherwise, you’re out of luck,” she says.
The patent filing process can vary widely in terms of cost and complexity, she says. Costs include filing fees and attorney fees. Smaller companies and individual inventors may qualify for discounts on USPTO fees. Costs may be higher for patent filings that require extensive modifications and lengthy communication with the patent office. Complexity depends on how much research USPTO examiners must do to determine the difference between existing inventions and the one in the filing.
For inventors interested in pursuing a patent for the first time, “I would highly recommend seeking out a patent practitioner—a patent attorney or patent agent—who offers free consultations to determine patentability, a possible action plan, cost, and a timeline for filing,” Knee says. Also, some universities have intellectual property legal offices that can advise professors and students on the patent process.
For someone who wants to file a patent themselves, here are some general steps:
File a provisional application when you have a proof of concept or prototype. This type of application doesn’t go through the USPTO but instead holds a place in line for your patent. Provisional applications expire after one year.
To follow up, file a nonprovisional application within one year of the first filing. This application is examined by the patent office and receives the filing date of the provisional application.
Promptly answer and respond to any USPTO rejections (called office actions), which explain the reasons your invention can’t be patented. Knee says it’s quite common to get a rejection. You can typically respond within three months at no cost or pay a fee for an extension of up to six months. If you don’t respond, the application will be considered abandoned.
If you receive a notice of allowance (NOA), celebrate! Your application is eligible to become a patent. Upon payment of some fees, you’ll receive an issue notification document showing the date when the patent will be officially granted, giving you the right to exclude others from using or selling your invention in the United States.
If you receive a notice called a final office action, you have two options. You can abandon the application, or you can file a request for continued examination, which requires you to pay for another round of prosecution and explain further why your invention deserves a patent.
The Value of Intellectual Property
Be careful disclosing information about your invention or selling it before filing a patent application, Knee says.“If you disclose your invention publicly and do not file an application within one year, you could be barred from receiving a patent on that exact invention,” she says. “Because of the ‘first to file’ system, if someone steals your idea by filing first, this can be hard and very expensive to reverse.” She also advises people to be careful about disclosing their inventions through social-media platforms or other communication methods.
In today’s intellectual property market, patents are currency. Knee has seen companies use patents as collateral for a loan, even when the patent application hasn’t been approved yet.
And other inventors use patents to launch their dream startup. “I have seen people use patents for help securing investors,” Knee says. But it’s not a one-and-done situation, she says. “The key is having one patent and filing additional applications that piggyback off of it. This process can be pricey but has a huge impact on stopping competitors from manufacturing similar products in a new field and protecting inventors in litigation battles.”
For IEEE, the accreditation of engineering programs is important. Accreditation is vital to the future of the profession, ensuring that the graduates are prepared to practice and establishing a link to a sustainable future with a talented pool of engineering and technology professionals.
IEEE’s involvement in the accreditation process ensures that students who graduate from approved programs have demonstrated the skills and abilities established by the criteria.
Technical professional associations such as IEEE are involved because it gives them a voice in the educational process for programs in their fields of interest. Accredited programs demonstrate to both prospective students and employers that the educational institutions meet a quality standard. For graduating students, it verifies that they’ve attended a quality program, and it supports their entry into the profession.
How does program accreditation work?
Accreditation is not a grade, score, or ranking. Programs are evaluated against a set of approved criteria to ensure that certain educational objectives are met.
IEEE plays a significant role in establishing the criteria and evaluating programs. The goal is to ensure the accredited educational programs have attained a level of performance in areas that meet or exceed minimum standards developed by experts in the field.
“My experiences have been very rewarding, and I hope to continue to have a positive impact on the quality of engineering education.” —Sarah Rajala
An accrediting body establishes the criteria. ABET, formerly known as the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, is the body deciding the criteria in the United States. It is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization that evaluates programs in the applied sciences, engineering, computing, and technology. IEEE is a founding member of the organization.
IEEE provides ABET with expert volunteers who serve as program evaluators, or PEVs. They visit institutions to review their programs using the approved criteria to discern whether the schools meet the standard. IEEE does not directly grant accreditation to an institution; ABET does. There are currently 35 technical professional associations that are member societies, including ASME, ASCE, and ASEE. Representatives from IEEE and other societies helped develop the criteria used to conduct the evaluations.
Recognizing the importance of program accreditation, many countries have established bodies and other processes to develop educational criteria. ABET also serves as the accrediting body for a growing number of programs outside the United States.
Become an evaluator
IEEE currently has more than 300 members serving as program evaluators but more are always needed. Becoming an evaluator provides a professional development opportunity, furthers IEEE’s mission, and supports the profession.
“My experiences have been very rewarding, and I hope to continue to have a positive impact on the quality of engineering education,” says IEEE Member Sarah Rajala, who is the 2024–2025 ABET president. A professor emeritus at Iowa State University, in Ames, Rajala has served as a program evaluator and assignment coordinator for IEEE’s Committee on Engineering Accreditation Activities.
IEEE accepts evaluator applications from its members in engineering and engineering technology. Each area has specific requirements, and applicants must choose one as their field of expertise. To learn more, go to the Program Evaluator Opportunities page on IEEE’s website.
Other bodies involved in engineering accreditation also need evaluators.
Already positioned at the center of the global semiconductor industry, Taiwan now wants to make itself a hub for innovation in advanced artificial intelligence. The island nation’s new leadership, in place since May 2024, has taken a number of steps to help the country take better advantage of the AI that its chips enable.
The fruits of the effort are starting to show. Electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn is building the country’s biggest AI supercomputer ever, using Nvidia’s latest chips. But Taiwan’s AI effort hinges on it finding enough skilled workers to do the job.
The island nation is confronting some pressing challenges—a declining birth rate of approximately 5.81 births per 1,000 people, an aging population, and rising geopolitical tensions in the Indo-Pacific. So leveraging AI for economic growth and sustainability has become increasingly vital, according to vice president Bi-khim Hsiao.
“AI can help us develop new solutions more quickly and efficiently, becoming another key engine for economic growth,” Hsiao said at an AI and sustainability forum in July.
President Lai Ching-te’s government is rolling out new measures designed to build robust infrastructure, promote AI adoption across various sectors, invest in data centers, establish supercomputers, and advance Taiwan’s control over its own AI systems.
It’s part of a strategic plan Lai’s Cabinet approved to strengthen its “Five Trusted Industry Sectors”: semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), defense, security, and next-generation communications. In the AI sector, Taiwan aims to leverage its hardware industry to drive growth in high-value AI applications‑targeting an output of over NT$1 trillion (US$31 billion) by 2026, from the current approximately NT$800 billion dollars, and train 200,000 AI and related professionals over the next four years.
To support these ambitions, the country will enhance the National Development Fund’s investments in AI-related companies and collaborate with the Ministry of Digital Affairs on a NT$10 billion initiative focused on the AI industry.
Furthermore, Taiwan is bolstering its technological infrastructure by improving computing power and developing energy-efficient data centers. Foxconn’s future supercomputer is an example. The system, which should be capable of 90 billion operations per second (90 exaflops), will be powered by 6,902 of Nvidia’s new GB200 (Grace-Blackwell) CPUs and GPUs.
Meanwhile, the government is also actively pursuing international partnerships while inviting U.S. AI startups to set up operations in Taiwan.
Workforce Issues
Taiwan’s small, 23.4 million population, its aging demographic, and its low birth rate make achieving its AI goals difficult. In a Cabinet meeting last month, Premier Cho Jung-tai underscored the necessity cultivating domestic expertise while attracting international professionals.
Although not exclusive to AI workers, Taiwan’s National Development Council (NDC) outlined a plan to educate and train 450,000 skilled professionals by 2028. The initiative also seeks to attract 120,000 foreign experts and 80,000 foreign technicians to fill a gap 200,000-person gap projected for Taiwan’s workforce by that date.
“This will ensure a sufficient supply of talent needed for the next phase of national development and build Taiwan’s competitive advantage,” Cabinet spokesperson Michelle Lee told reporters.
But the domestic workforce likely won’t be enough, and Taiwan is competing with many other nations for AI talent. “To bring in international talents, Taiwan really needs to highlight its incentives, since there’s a huge global demand for top-tier AI professionals,” says Ming-Shun Tsai, Provost of Taiwan AIA.
“In semiconductor manufacturing, machine learning and deep learning are increasingly being used to speed up product development and improve yield rates. This trend is growing fast.” —anonymous semiconductor manager
The government shares this view. Last month, NDC Deputy Minister Kao Shien-quey announced plans to enhance the Taiwan Gold Card program by introducing what it’s calling ‘Global Elite’ cards. The employment gold card currently serves as an open work permit, allowing foreign professionals with monthly salary exceeding NT$160,000 (about US $4,956, or $59,472 per year) to work in Taiwan for up to three years. The Global Elite card is targeted toward top-tier professionals who will work for local companies that offer annual salaries surpassing NT$6 million (around US $188,306). Recipients will be eligible for permanent residency after just one year of employment and will gain access to social benefits, including long-term care and disability services for their families. Additionally, their spouses will qualify for work permits.
Naturally, NDC views international students at Taiwanese universities as a vital source of future talent. Earlier this year, a new program was launched to attract students from nearby ASEAN countries, including Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines, with a focus on AI, semiconductors, and other fields. Participants will receive a full tuition and fee waiver for up to two years, along with a monthly stipend of at least NT$10,000 paid by local companies. In return, graduates must work in Taiwan for at least two years after finishing their studies.
AI Industry Heads South
The AI industry is starting to cluster in southern Taiwan. The Foxconn AI supercomputer is to be constructed in Kaohsiung, and in August, Nvidia-rival Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) announced plans to establish R&D hubs there and in Tainan, both of which host science parks.
“With major players like TSMC and global tech giant Nvidia setting up operations in Kaohsiung, it’s essential for the government to invest enough resources in universities in southern Taiwan. This will help us nurture the talents that’s urgently needed in the island’s key industries,” says Yue-Min Wan, a professor of electronics engineering at I-Shou University in southern Kaohsiung City.
TSMC itself, which has advanced fabs in the Tainan area, is in need of more AI talent. “In semiconductor manufacturing, machine learning and deep learning are increasingly being used to speed up product development and improve yield rates. This trend is growing fast,” says a senior manager in Taiwan’s semiconductor industry who did not want to be named.
The manager notes that companies are increasingly investing in AI training programs and service subscriptions to upskill their workforce. This has led to a rising demand for experts capable of integrating AI with environmental and sustainability initiatives, in an effort to drive both risk management and innovation, he says.
Many U.S. university students returning to campus this month will find their school no longer has a diversity, equity, and inclusion program. More than 200 universities in 30 states so far this year have eliminated, cut back, or changed their DEI efforts, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
It is happening at mostly publicly funded universities, because state legislators and governors are enacting laws that prohibit or defund DEI programs. They’re also cutting budgets and sometimes implementing other measures that restrict diversity efforts. Some colleges have closed their DEI programs altogether to avoid political pressure.
The Institute asked Andrea J. Goldsmith, a top educator and longtime proponent of diversity efforts within the engineering field and society, to weigh in.
Goldsmith shared her personal opinion about DEI with The Institute, not as Princeton’s dean of engineering and applied sciences. A wireless communications pioneer, she is an IEEE Fellow who launched the IEEE Board of Directors Diversity and Inclusion Committee in 2019 and once served as its chair.
She received this year’s IEEE Mulligan Education Medal for educating, mentoring, and inspiring generations of students, and for authoring pioneering textbooks in advanced digital communications.
“For the longest time,” Goldsmith says, “there was so much positive momentum toward improving diversity and inclusion. And now there’s a backlash, which is really unfortunate, but it’s not everywhere.” She says she is proud of her university’s president, who has been vocal that diversity is about excellence and that Princeton is better because its students and faculty are diverse.
In the interview, Goldsmith spoke about why she thinks the topic has become so controversial, what measures universities can take to ensure their students have a sense of belonging, and what can be done to retain female engineers—a group that has been underrepresented in the field.
The Institute:What do you think is behind the movement to dissolve DEI programs?
Goldsmith: That’s a very complex question, and I certainly don’t have the answer.
It has become a politically charged issue because there’s a notion that DEI programs are really about quotas or advancing people who are not deserving of the positions they have been given. Part of the backlash also was spurred by the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the war in Gaza, and the protests. One notion is that Jewish students are also a minority that needs protection, and why is it that DEI programs are only focused on certain segments of the population as opposed to diversity and inclusion for everyone, for people with all different perspectives, and those who are victims or subject to explicit bias, implicit bias, or discrimination? I think that these are legitimate concerns, and that programs around diversity and inclusion should be addressing them.
The goal of diversity and inclusion is that everybody should be able to participate and reach their full potential. That should go for every profession and, in particular, every segment of the engineering community.
Also in the middle of this backlash is the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision that ended race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions—which means that universities cannot take diversity into account explicitly in their admission of students. The decision in and of itself only affects undergraduate admissions, but it has raised concerns about broadening the decision to faculty hiring or for other kinds of programs that promote diversity and inclusion within universities and private companies.
I think the Supreme Court’s decision, along with the political polarization and the recent protests at universities, have all been pieces of a puzzle that have come together to paint all DEI programs with a broad brush of not being about excellence and lowering barriers but really being about promoting certain groups of people at the expense of others.
How might the elimination of DEI programs impact the engineering profession specifically?
Goldsmith: I think it depends on what it means to eliminate DEI programs. Programs to promote the diversity of ideas and perspectives in engineering are essential for the success of the profession. As an optimist, I believe we should continue to have programs that ensure our profession can bring in people with diverse perspectives and experiences.
Does that mean that every DEI program in engineering companies and universities needs to evolve or change? Not necessarily. Maybe some programs do because they aren’t necessarily achieving the goal of ensuring that diverse people can thrive.
“My work in the profession of engineering to enhance diversity and inclusion has really been about excellence for the profession.”
We need to be mindful of the concerns that have been raised about DEI programs. I don’t think they are completely unfounded.
If we do the easy thing—which is to just eliminate the programs without replacing them with something else or evolving them—then it will hurt the engineering profession.
The metrics being used to assess whether these programs are achieving their goals need to be reviewed. If they are not, the programs need to be improved. If we do that, I think DEI programs will continue to positively impact the engineering profession.
For universities that have cut or reduced their programs, what are some other ways to make sure all students have a sense of belonging?
Goldsmith: I would look at what other initiatives could be started that would have a different name but still have the goal of ensuring that students have a sense of belonging.
Long before DEI programs, there were other initiatives within universities that helped students figure out their place within the school, initiated them into what it means to be a member of the community, and created a sense of belonging through various activities. These include prefreshman and freshman orientation programs, student groups and organizations, student-led courses (with or without credit), eating clubs, fraternities, and sororities, to name just a few. I am referring here to any program within a university that creates a sense of community for those who participate—which is a pretty broad category of programs.
These continue, but they aren’t called DEI programs. They’ve been around for decades, if not since the university system was founded.
How can universities and companies ensure that all people have a good experience in school and the workplace?
Goldsmith: This year has been a huge challenge for universities, with protests, sit-ins, arrests, and violence.
One of the things I said in my opening remarks to freshmen at the start of this semester is that you will learn more from people around you who have different viewpoints and perspectives than you will from people who think like you. And that engaging with people who disagree with you in a respectful and scholarly way and being open to potentially changing your perspective will not only create a better community of scholars but also better prepare you for postgraduation life, where you may be interacting with a boss, coworkers, family, and friends who don’t agree with you.
Finding ways to engage with people who don’t agree with you is essential for engaging with the world in a positive way. I know we don’t think about that as much in engineering because we’re going about building our technologies, doing our equations, or developing our programs. But so much of engineering is collaboration and understanding other people, whether it’s your customers, your boss, or your collaborators.
I would argue everyone is diverse. There’s no such thing as a nondiverse person, because no two people have the exact same set of experiences. Figuring out how to engage with people who are different is essential for success in college, grad school, your career, and your life.
I think it’s a bit different in companies, because you can fire someone who does a sit-in in the boss’s office. You can’t do that in universities. But I think workplaces also need to create an environment where diverse people can engage with each other beyond just what they’re working on in a way that’s respectful and intellectual.
Reports show that half of female engineers leave the high-tech industry because they have a poor work experience. Why is that, and what can be done to retain women?
Goldsmith: That is one of the harder questions facing the engineering profession. The challenges that women face are implicit, including sometimes explicit bias. In extreme cases, there are sexual and other kinds of harassment, and bullying. These egregious behaviors have decreased some. The Me Too movement raised a lot of awareness, but [poor behavior] still is far more prevalent than we want it to be. It’s very difficult for women who have experienced that kind of egregious and illegal behavior to speak up. For example, if it’s their Ph.D. advisor, what does that mean if they speak up? Do they lose their funding? Do they lose all the research they’ve done? This powerful person can bad-mouth them for job applications and potential future opportunities.
So, it’s very difficult to curb these behaviors. However, there has been a lot of awareness raised, and universities and companies have put protections in place against them.
Then there’s implicit bias, where a qualified woman is passed over for a promotion, or women are asked to take meeting notes but not the men. Or a woman leader gets a bad performance review because she doesn’t take no for an answer, is too blunt, or too pushy. All these are things that male leaders are actually lauded for.
There is data on the barriers and challenges that women face and what universities and employers can do to mitigate them. These are the experiences that hurt women’s morale and upward mobility and, ultimately, make them leave the profession.
One of the most important things for a woman to be successful in this profession is to have mentors and supporters. So it is important to make sure that women engineers are assigned mentors at every stage, from student to senior faculty or engineer and everything in between, to help them understand the challenges they face and how to deal with them, as well as to promote and support them.
I also think having leaders in universities and companies recognize and articulate the importance of diversity helps set the tone from the top down and tends to mitigate some of the bias and implicit bias in people lower in the organization.
I think the backlash against DEI is going to make it harder for leaders to articulate the value of diversity, and to put in place some of the best practices around ensuring that diverse people are considered for positions and reach their full potential.
We have definitely taken a step backward in the past year on the understanding that diversity is about excellence and implementing best practices that we know work to mitigate the challenges that diverse people face. But that just means we need to redouble our efforts.
Although this isn’t the best time to be optimistic about diversity in engineering, if we take the long view, I think that things are certainly better than they were 20 or 30 years ago. And I think 20 or 30 years from now they’ll be even better.
Many U.S. university students returning to campus this month will find their school no longer has a diversity, equity, and inclusion program. More than 200 universities in 30 states so far this year have eliminated, cut back, or changed their DEI efforts, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
It is happening at mostly publicly funded universities, because state legislators and governors are enacting laws that prohibit or defund DEI programs. They’re also cutting budgets and sometimes implementing other measures that restrict diversity efforts. Some colleges have closed their DEI programs altogether to avoid political pressure.
The Institute asked Andrea J. Goldsmith, a top educator and longtime proponent of diversity efforts within the engineering field and society, to weigh in.
Goldsmith shared her personal opinion about DEI with The Institute, not as Princeton’s dean of engineering and applied sciences. A wireless communications pioneer, she is an IEEE Fellow who launched the IEEE Board of Directors Diversity and Inclusion Committee in 2019 and once served as its chair.
She received this year’s IEEE Mulligan Education Medal for educating, mentoring, and inspiring generations of students, and for authoring pioneering textbooks in advanced digital communications.
“For the longest time,” Goldsmith says, “there was so much positive momentum toward improving diversity and inclusion. And now there’s a backlash, which is really unfortunate, but it’s not everywhere.” She says she is proud of her university’s president, who has been vocal that diversity is about excellence and that Princeton is better because its students and faculty are diverse.
In the interview, Goldsmith spoke about why she thinks the topic has become so controversial, what measures universities can take to ensure their students have a sense of belonging, and what can be done to retain female engineers—a group that has been underrepresented in the field.
The Institute:What do you think is behind the movement to dissolve DEI programs?
Goldsmith: That’s a very complex question, and I certainly don’t have the answer.
It has become a politically charged issue because there’s a notion that DEI programs are really about quotas or advancing people who are not deserving of the positions they have been given. Part of the backlash also was spurred by the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the war in Gaza, and the protests. One notion is that Jewish students are also a minority that needs protection, and why is it that DEI programs are only focused on certain segments of the population as opposed to diversity and inclusion for everyone, for people with all different perspectives, and those who are victims or subject to explicit bias, implicit bias, or discrimination? I think that these are legitimate concerns, and that programs around diversity and inclusion should be addressing them.
The goal of diversity and inclusion is that everybody should be able to participate and reach their full potential. That should go for every profession and, in particular, every segment of the engineering community.
Also in the middle of this backlash is the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision that ended race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions—which means that universities cannot take diversity into account explicitly in their admission of students. The decision in and of itself only affects undergraduate admissions, but it has raised concerns about broadening the decision to faculty hiring or for other kinds of programs that promote diversity and inclusion within universities and private companies.
I think the Supreme Court’s decision, along with the political polarization and the recent protests at universities, have all been pieces of a puzzle that have come together to paint all DEI programs with a broad brush of not being about excellence and lowering barriers but really being about promoting certain groups of people at the expense of others.
How might the elimination of DEI programs impact the engineering profession specifically?
Goldsmith: I think it depends on what it means to eliminate DEI programs. Programs to promote the diversity of ideas and perspectives in engineering are essential for the success of the profession. As an optimist, I believe we should continue to have programs that ensure our profession can bring in people with diverse perspectives and experiences.
Does that mean that every DEI program in engineering companies and universities needs to evolve or change? Not necessarily. Maybe some programs do because they aren’t necessarily achieving the goal of ensuring that diverse people can thrive.
“My work in the profession of engineering to enhance diversity and inclusion has really been about excellence for the profession.”
We need to be mindful of the concerns that have been raised about DEI programs. I don’t think they are completely unfounded.
If we do the easy thing—which is to just eliminate the programs without replacing them with something else or evolving them—then it will hurt the engineering profession.
The metrics being used to assess whether these programs are achieving their goals need to be reviewed. If they are not, the programs need to be improved. If we do that, I think DEI programs will continue to positively impact the engineering profession.
For universities that have cut or reduced their programs, what are some other ways to make sure all students have a sense of belonging?
Goldsmith: I would look at what other initiatives could be started that would have a different name but still have the goal of ensuring that students have a sense of belonging.
Long before DEI programs, there were other initiatives within universities that helped students figure out their place within the school, initiated them into what it means to be a member of the community, and created a sense of belonging through various activities. These include prefreshman and freshman orientation programs, student groups and organizations, student-led courses (with or without credit), eating clubs, fraternities, and sororities, to name just a few. I am referring here to any program within a university that creates a sense of community for those who participate—which is a pretty broad category of programs
These continue, but they aren’t called DEI programs. They’ve been around for decades, if not since the university system was founded.
How can universities and companies ensure that all people have a good experience in school and the workplace?
Goldsmith: This year has been a huge challenge for universities, with protests, sit-ins, arrests, and violence.
One of the things I said in my opening remarks to freshmen at the start of this semester is that you will learn more from people around you who have different viewpoints and perspectives than you will from people who think like you. And that engaging with people who disagree with you in a respectful and scholarly way and being open to potentially changing your perspective will not only create a better community of scholars but also better prepare you for postgraduation life, where you may be interacting with a boss, coworkers, family, and friends who don’t agree with you.
Finding ways to engage with people who don’t agree with you is essential for engaging with the world in a positive way. I know we don’t think about that as much in engineering because we’re going about building our technologies, doing our equations, or developing our programs. But so much of engineering is collaboration and understanding other people, whether it’s your customers, your boss, or your collaborators.
I would argue everyone is diverse. There’s no such thing as a nondiverse person, because no two people have the exact same set of experiences. Figuring out how to engage with people who are different is essential for success in college, grad school, your career, and your life.
I think it’s a bit different in companies, because you can fire someone who does a sit-in in the boss’s office. You can’t do that in universities. But I think workplaces also need to create an environment where diverse people can engage with each other beyond just what they’re working on in a way that’s respectful and intellectual.
Reports show that half of female engineers leave the high-tech industry because they have a poor work experience. Why is that, and what can be done to retain women?
Goldsmith: That is one of the harder questions facing the engineering profession. The challenges that women face are implicit, including sometimes explicit bias. In extreme cases, there are sexual and other kinds of harassment, and bullying. These egregious behaviors have decreased some. The Me Too movement raised a lot of awareness, but [poor behavior] still is far more prevalent than we want it to be. It’s very difficult for women who have experienced that kind of egregious and illegal behavior to speak up. For example, if it’s their Ph.D. advisor, what does that mean if they speak up? Do they lose their funding? Do they lose all the research they’ve done? This powerful person can bad-mouth them for job applications and potential future opportunities.
So, it’s very difficult to curb these behaviors. However, there has been a lot of awareness raised, and universities and companies have put protections in place against them.
Then there’s implicit bias, where a qualified woman is passed over for a promotion, or women are asked to take meeting notes but not the men. Or a woman leader gets a bad performance review because she doesn’t take no for an answer, is too blunt, or too pushy. All these are things that male leaders are actually lauded for.
There is data on the barriers and challenges that women face and what universities and employers can do to mitigate them. These are the experiences that hurt women’s morale and upward mobility and, ultimately, make them leave the profession.
One of the most important things for a woman to be successful in this profession is to have mentors and supporters. So it is important to make sure that women engineers are assigned mentors at every stage, from student to senior faculty or engineer and everything in between, to help them understand the challenges they face and how to deal with them, as well as to promote and support them.
I also think having leaders in universities and companies recognize and articulate the importance of diversity helps set the tone from the top down and tends to mitigate some of the bias and implicit bias in people lower in the organization.
I think the backlash against DEI is going to make it harder for leaders to articulate the value of diversity, and to put in place some of the best practices around ensuring that diverse people are considered for positions and reach their full potential.
We have definitely taken a step backward in the past year on the understanding that diversity is about excellence and implementing best practices that we know work to mitigate the challenges that diverse people face. But that just means we need to redouble our efforts.
Although this isn’t the best time to be optimistic about diversity in engineering, if we take the long view, I think that things are certainly better than they were 20 or 30 years ago. And I think 20 or 30 years from now they’ll be even better.
Wesley L. Harris’s life is a testament to the power of mentorship and determination. Harris, born in 1941 in Richmond, Virginia, grew up during the tumultuous years of the Civil Rights Movement and faced an environment fraught with challenges. His parents, both of whom only had a third-grade education, walked to Richmond from rural Virginia counties when the Great Depression left the region’s farming communities destitute. They found work as laborers in the city’s tobacco factories but pushed their son to pursue higher education so he could live a better life.
Today, Harris is a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT and heads the school’s Hypersonic Research Laboratory. More importantly, he is committed to fostering the next generation of engineers, particularly students of color.
“I’ve been keeping my head down, working with students of color—especially at the Ph.D. level—to produce more scholars,” Harris says. “I do feel good about that.”
From physics to aerospace engineering
Harris’s journey into the world of science began under the guidance of his physics teacher at the all-Black Armstrong High School, in Richmond. The instructor taught Harris how to build a cloud chamber to investigate the collision of alpha particles with water droplets. The chamber made it possible to visualize the passage of ionizing radiation emitted by radium 226, which Harris sourced from a wristwatch that used the substance to make the watch hands glow in the dark.
The project won first prize at Virginia’s statewide Black high school science fair, and he took the bold step of signing up for a separate science fair held for the state’s White students. Harris’s project received the third-place prize in physics at that event.
Those awards and his teacher’s unwavering belief in Harris’s potential pushed him to aim higher. He says that he wanted nothing more than to become a physicist like her. Ironically, it was also her influence that led him to shift his career path from physics to aeronautical engineering.
When discussing which college he should attend, she spoke to him as though he were a soldier getting his marching orders. “Wesley, you will go to the University of Virginia [in Charlottesville],” she proclaimed.
Harris applied, knowing full well that the school did not allow Black students in the 1960s to pursue degrees in mathematics, physics, chemistry, English, economics, or political science.
The only available point of entry for him was the university’s School of Engineering. He chose aerospace as his focus—the only engineering discipline that interested him. Harris became one of only seven Black students on a campus with 4,000 undergrads and the first Black student to join the prestigious Jefferson Society literary and debate club. He graduated in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering. He went on to earn his master’s and doctoral degrees in aerospace engineering from Princeton in 1966 and 1968, respectively.
Harris’s Ph.D. thesis advisor at Princeton reinforced the values of mentorship and leadership instilled by his high school teacher, urging Harris to focus not only on his research but on how he could uplift others.
Harris began his teaching career by breaking down barriers at the University of Virginia in 1968. He was the first Black person in the school’s history to be offered a tenured faculty position. He was also the university’s first Black engineering professor. In 1972, he joined MIT as a professor of aeronautics and astronautics.
Harris’s dedication to supporting underrepresented minority groups at MIT began early in his tenure. In 1975, he founded the Office of Minority Education, where he pioneered innovative teaching methods such as videotaping and replaying lectures, which helped countless students succeed. “Some of those old videotapes may still be around,” he says, laughing.
“I’ve been keeping my head down, working with students of color—especially at the Ph.D. level—to produce more scholars. I do feel good about that.”
Over the years, he has periodically stepped away from MIT to take on other roles, including Program Manager in the Fluid and Thermal Physics Office and as manager of Computational Methods at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., from 1979 to 1980. He returned to NASA in 1993 and served as Associate Administrator for Aeronautics, overseeing personnel, programs, and facilities until 1995.
Harris is a respected aeronautical innovator. Near the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army approached MIT to help it solve a problem. Helicopters were being shot down by the enemy, who had learned to distinguish attack helicopters from those used for performing reconnaissance or transporting personnel and cargo by the noise they made. The Army needed a solution that would reduce the helicopters’ acoustic signatures without compromising performance. Harris and his aeronautics team at MIT delivered that technology. In January 1978, they presented a lab report detailing their findings to the U.S. Department of Defense. “Experimental and Theoretical Studies on Model Helicopter Rotor Noise” was subsequently published in The Journal of Sound and Vibration. A year later, Harris and his colleagues at the Fluid Dynamic Research Laboratory wrote another lab report on the topic, “Parametric Studies of Model Helicopter Blade Slap and Rotational Noise.”
Harris has also heightened scientists’ understanding of the climate-altering effects of shock waves propagating upward from aircraft flying at supersonic speeds. He discovered that these high-speed airflows trigger chemical reactions among the carbon, oxides, nitrides, and sulfides in the atmosphere.
Despite his technical achievements, Harris says his greatest fulfillment comes from mentoring students. He takes immense pride in the four students who recently earned doctorates in hypersonics under his guidance, especially a Black woman who graduated this year.
Harris’s commitment to nurturing young talent extends beyond his graduate students. For more than two decades, he has served as a housemaster at MIT’s New House residence hall, where he helps first-year undergraduate students successfully transition to campus life.
“You must provide an environment that fosters the total development of the student, not just mastery of physics, chemistry, math, and economics,” Harris says.
He takes great satisfaction in watching his students grow and succeed, knowing that he helped prepare them to make a positive impact on the world.
Reflecting on his career, Harris acknowledges the profound impact of the mentors who guided him. Their lessons continue to influence his work and his unwavering commitment to mentoring the next generation.
“I’ve always wanted to be like my high school teacher—a physicist who not only had deep knowledge of the scientific fundamentals but also compassion and love for Black folks,” he says.
Through his work, Harris has not only advanced the field of aerospace engineering but has also paved the way for future generations to soar.
In the 1800s, aluminum was considered more valuable than gold or silver because it was so expensive to produce the metal in any quantity. Thanks to the Hall-Héroult smelting process, which pioneered the electrochemical reduction of aluminum oxide in 1886, electrochemistry advancements made aluminum more available and affordable, rapidly transforming it into a core material used in the manufacturing of aircraft, power lines, food-storage containers and more.
As society mobilizes against the pressing climate crisis we face today, we find ourselves seeking transformative solutions to tackle environmental challenges. Much as electrochemistry modernized aluminum production, science holds the key to revolutionizing steel and iron manufacturing.
Electrochemistry can help save the planet
As the world embraces clean energy solutions such as wind turbines, electric vehicles, and solar panels to address the climate crisis, changing how we approach manufacturing becomes critical. Traditional steel production—which requires a significant amount of energy to burn fossil fuels at temperatures exceeding 1,600 °C to convert ore into iron—currently accounts for about 10 percent of the planet’s annual CO2 emissions. Continuing with conventional methods risks undermining progress toward environmental goals.
Scientists already are applying electrochemistry—which provides direct electrical control of oxidation-reduction reactions—to convert ore into iron. The conversion is an essential step in steel production and the most emissions-spewing part. Electrochemical engineers can drive the shift toward a cleaner steel and iron industry by rethinking and reprioritizing optimizations.
When I first studied engineering thermodynamics in 1998, electricity—which was five times the price per joule of heat—was considered a premium form of energy to be used only when absolutely required.
Since then the price of electricity has steadily decreased. But emissions are now known to be much more harmful and costly.
Engineers today need to adjust currently accepted practices to develop new solutions that prioritize mass efficiency over energy efficiency.
In addition to electrochemical engineers working toward a cleaner steel and iron industry, advancements in technology and cheaper renewables have put us in an “electrochemical moment” that promises change across multiple sectors.
The plummeting cost of photovoltaic panels and wind turbines, for example, has led to more affordable renewable electricity. Advances in electrical distribution systems that were designed for electric vehicles can be repurposed for modular electrochemical reactors.
Electrochemistry holds the potential to support the development of clean, green infrastructure beyond batteries, electrolyzers, and fuel cells. Electrochemical processes and methods can be scaled to produce metals, ceramics, composites, and even polymers at scales previously reserved for thermochemical processes. With enough effort and thought, electrochemical production can lead to billions of tons of metal, concrete, and plastic. And because electrochemistry directly accesses the electron transfer fundamental to chemistry, the same materials can be recycled using renewable energy.
As renewables are expected to account for more than 90 percent of global electricity expansion during the next five years, scientists and engineers focused on electrochemistry must figure out how best to utilize low-cost wind and solar energy.
The core components of electrochemical systems, including complex oxides, corrosion-resistant metals, and high-power precision power converters, are now an exciting set of tools for the next evolution of electrochemical engineering.
The scientists who came before have created a stable set of building blocks; the next generation of electrochemical engineers needs to use them to create elegant, reliable reactors and other systems to produce the processes of the future.
Three decades ago, electrochemical engineering courses were, for the most part, electives and graduate-level. Now almost every institutional top-ranked R&D center has full tracks of electrochemical engineering. Students interested in the field should take both electroanalytical chemistry and electrochemical methods classes and electrochemical energy storage and materials processing coursework.
Although scaled electrochemical production is possible, it is not inevitable. It will require the combined efforts of the next generation of engineers to reach its potential scale.
Just as scientists found a way to unlock the potential of the abundant, once-unattainable aluminum, engineers now have the opportunity to shape a cleaner, more sustainable future. Electrochemistry has the power to flip the switch to clean energy, paving the way for a world in which environmental harmony and industrial progress go hand in hand.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Few devices are as crucial to people’s everyday lives as their household appliances. Electrical engineer Erika Cruz says it’s her mission to make sure they operate smoothly.
Cruz helps design washing machines and dryers for Whirlpool, the multinational appliance manufacturer.
Erika Cruz
Employer:
Whirlpool
Occupation:
Associate electrical engineer
Education:
Bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering, Industrial University of Santander, in Bucaramanga, Colombia
As a member of the electromechanical components team at Whirlpool’s research and engineering center in Benton Harbor, Mich., she oversees the development of timers, lid locks, humidity sensors, and other components.
More engineering goes into the machines than is obvious. Because the appliances are sold around the world, she says, they must comply with different technical and safety standards and environmental conditions. And reliability is key.
“If the washer’s door lock gets stuck and your clothes are inside, your whole day is going to be a mess,” she says.
While appliances can be taken for granted, Cruz loves that her work contributes in its own small way to the quality of life of so many.
“I love knowing that every time I’m working on a new design, the lives of millions of people will be improved by using it,” she says.
From Industrial Design to Electrical Engineering
Cruz grew up in Bucaramanga, Colombia, where her father worked as an electrical engineer, designing control systems for poultry processing plants. Her childhood home was full of electronics, and Cruz says her father taught her about technology. He paid her to organize his resistors, for example, and asked her to create short videos for work presentations about items he was designing. He also took Cruz and her sister along with him to the processing plants.
“We would go and see how the big machines worked,” she says. “It was very impressive because of their complexity and impact. That’s how I got interested in technology.”
In 2010, Cruz enrolled in Colombia’s Industrial University of Santander, in Bucaramanga, to study industrial design. But she quickly became disenchanted with the course’s focus on designing objects like fancy tables and ergonomic chairs.
“I wanted to design huge machines like my father did,” she says.
A teacher suggested that she study mechanical engineering instead. But her father was concerned about discrimination she might face in that career.
“He told me it would be difficult to get a job in the industry because mechanical engineers work with heavy machinery, and they saw women as being fragile,” Cruz says.
Her father thought electrical engineers would be more receptive to women, so she switched fields.
“I am very glad I ended up studying electronics because you can apply it to so many different fields,” Cruz says. She received a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering in 2019.
The Road to America
While at university, Cruz signed up for a program that allowed Colombian students to work summer jobs in the United States. She held a variety of summer positions in Galveston, Texas, from 2017 to 2019, including cashier, housekeeper, and hostess.
She met her future husband in 2018, an American working at the same amusement park as she did. When she returned the following summer, they started dating, and that September they married. Since she had already received her degree, he was eager for her to move to the states permanently, but she made the difficult decision to return to Colombia.
“With the language barrier and my lack of engineering experience, I knew if I stayed in the United States, I would have to continue working jobs like housekeeping forever,” she says. “So I told my husband he had to wait for me because I was going back home to get some engineering experience.”
“I love knowing that every time I’m working on a new design, the lives of millions of people will be improved by using it.”
Cruz applied for engineering jobs in neighboring Brazil, which had more opportunities than Colombia did. In 2021, she joined Whirlpool as an electrical engineer at its R&D site in Joinville, Brazil. There, she introduced into mass production sensors and actuators provided by new suppliers.
Meanwhile, she applied for a U.S. Green Card, which would allow her to work and live permanently in the country. She received it six months after starting her job. Cruz asked her manager about transferring to one of Whirlpool’s U.S. facilities, not expecting to have any luck. Her manager set up a phone call with the manager of the components team at the company’s Benton Harbor site to discuss the request. Cruz didn’t realize that the call was actually a job interview. She was offered a position there as an electrical engineer and moved to Michigan later that year.
Designing Appliances Is Complex
Designing a new washing machine or dryer is a complex process, Cruz says. First, feedback from customers about desirable features is used to develop a high-level design. Then the product design work is divided among small teams of engineers, each responsible for a given subsystem, including hardware, software, materials, and components.
Part of Cruz’s job is to test components from different suppliers to make sure they meet safety, reliability, and performance requirements. She also writes the documentation that explains to other engineers about the components’ function and design.
Cruz then helps select the groups of components to be used in a particular application—combining, say, three temperature sensors with two humidity sensors in an optimized location to create a system that finds the best time to stop the dryer.
Building a Supportive Environment
Cruz loves her job, but her father’s fears about her entering a male-dominated field weren’t unfounded. Discrimination was worse in Colombia, she says, where she regularly experienced inappropriate comments and behavior from university classmates and teachers.
Even in the United States, she points out, “As a female engineer, you have to actually show you are able to do your job, because occasionally at the beginning of a project men are not convinced.”
In both Brazil and Michigan, Cruz says, she’s been fortunate to often end up on teams with a majority of women, who created a supportive environment. That support was particularly important when she had her first child and struggled to balance work and home life.
“It’s easier to talk to women about these struggles,” she says. “They know how it feels because they have been through it too.”
Update Your Knowledge
Working in the consumer electronics industry is rewarding, Cruz says. She loves going into a store or visiting someone’s home and seeing the machines that she’s helped build in action.
A degree in electronics engineering is a must for the field, Cruz says, but she’s also a big advocate of developing project management and critical thinking skills. She is a certified associate in project management, granted by the Project Management Institute, and has been trained in using tools that facilitate critical thinking. She says the project management program taught her how to solve problems in a more systematic way and helped her stand out in interviews.
It’s also important to constantly update your knowledge, Cruz says, “because electronics is a discipline that doesn’t stand still. Keep learning. Electronics is a science that is constantly growing.”
IEEE TryEngineering has partnered with Keysight Technologies to develop lesson plans focused on electronics and power simulation. Keysight provides hardware, software, and services to a wide variety of industries, particularly in the area of electronic measurement.
IEEE TryEngineering, an IEEE Educational Activities program, empowers educators to foster the next generation of technology innovators through free, online access to culturally relevant, developmentally appropriate, and educationally sound instructional resources for teachers and community volunteers.
The lesson plans cover a variety of STEM topics, experience levels, and age ranges. Educators should be able to find an applicable topic for their students, regardless of their grade level or interests.
Lesson plans on circuits
There are already a number of lesson plans available through the Keysight partnership that introduce students to electrical concepts, with more being developed. The most popular one thus far is Series and Parallel Circuits, which has been viewed more than 100 times each month. Teams of pupils predict the difference between a parallel and serial circuit design by building examples using wires, light bulbs, and batteries.
“TryEngineering is proud to be Keysight’s partner in attaining the ambitious goal of bringing engineering lessons to 1 million students in 2024.” —Debra Gulick
The newest of the Keysight-sponsored lesson plans, Light Up Name Badge, teaches the basics of circuitry, such as the components of a circuit, series and parallel circuits, and electronic component symbols. Students can apply their newfound knowledge in a design challenge wherein they create a light-up badge with their name.
Developing a workforce through STEM outreach
“Keysight’s commitment to workforce development through preuniversity STEM outreach makes it an ideal partner for IEEE TryEngineering,” says Debra Gulick, director of student and academic education programs for IEEE Educational Activities.
In addition, Keysight’s corporate social responsibility vision to build a better planet by accelerating innovation to connect and secure the world while employing a global business framework of ethical, environmentally sustainable, and socially responsible operations makes it a suitable IEEE partner.
“TryEngineering is proud to be Keysight’s partner in attaining the ambitious goal of bringing engineering lessons to 1 million students in 2024,” Gulick says.
Author and leadership expert John C. Maxwell famously said, “The single biggest way to impact an organization is to focus on leadership development. There is almost no limit to the potential of an organization that recruits good people, raises them up as leaders, and continually develops them.”
Experts confirm that there are clear benefits to fostering leadership by encouraging employees’ professional growth and nurturing and developing company leaders. A culture of leadership development and innovation boosts employee engagement by 20 percent to 25 percent, according to an analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Companies are 22 percent more profitable, on average, when they engage their employees by building a culture of leadership, innovation, and recognition, according to Zippia research.
IEEE Leading Technical Teams is a live, six-hour course offered both in person and virtually. Addressing challenges that come with leading groups, it is designed for team leaders, managers, and directors of engineering and technical teams.
“Participating benefited me and my employer by enhancing my leadership skills in inspiring others to achieve the goals of our organization,” says Stephen Wilkowski, a system test engineer at CACI International in Reston, Va., who completed the training. “I found the leadership practices assessment to be very valuable, as I appreciated the anonymous feedback received from those who I work with. I would recommend the training to anyone desiring to improve their leadership skills.”
Attendees participate in the 360° Leadership Practices Inventory, a tool that solicits confidential feedback on the participant’s strengths and opportunities for improvement from their team members and managers. The program encompasses instructor-led exercises and case studies demonstrating the application of best practices to workplace challenges.
Participants learn the “five practices of exemplary leadership” and receive valuable peer coaching.
To learn more about in-person and virtual options for individuals and companies, complete this form.
A mini-MBA for technologists
The 12-week IEEE | Rutgers Online Mini-MBA for Engineers and Technical Professionals program covers business strategy, new product development management, financial analysis, sales and marketing, and leadership. It includes a combination of expert instruction, peer interaction, self-paced video lessons, interactive assessments, live office hours, and hands-on capstone project experience. The program offers flexible learning opportunities for individual learners as well as customized company cohort options.
Developing professionals into strong leaders can have a lasting impact on a company, and the IEEE Professional Development Suite can help make that possible.
“The mini-MBA was a great opportunity to explore other areas of business that I don’t typically encounter,” says graduate Jonathan Bentz, a senior manager at Nvidia. “I have a customer-facing technical role, and the mini-MBA allowed me to get a taste of the full realm of business leadership.”
The Intensive Wireless interactive live course provides training necessary to stay on top of key developments in the dynamic, rapidly evolving communications industry. Designed for those with an engineering background who want to enhance their knowledge of wireless communication technologies, the series is an ideal way to train individual employees or your entire team at once.
The Advanced Topics in Wireless series is for engineers and technical professionals with a working knowledge of wireless who are looking to enhance their skill set. The series dives into recent advancements, applications, and use cases in emerging connectivity.
Participants in the live, online course series develop a comprehensive view of 5G/NR technology, as well as an understanding of the implementation of all the ITU-specified use case categories such as enhanced mobile broadband, mIoT, and ultra-reliable low-latency communication. The series also provides a robust foundation on the network architecture and the evolution of technology, which enables fully open radio access networks.
Tailored for professionals, faculty, and students, the IEEE eLearning Library taps into a wealth of expertise from the organization’s global network of more than 450,000 industry and academia members. Courses cover a wide variety of disciplines including artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, cyber and data security, power and energy, telecommunications, and IEEE standards.
You can help foster growth and leadership skills for your organization by offering employees access to hundreds of courses. Start exploring the library by filling out this form.
Completion of course programs offers learners the ability to earn IEEE certificates bearing professional development hours, continuing education units, and digital badges.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
The
Large Hadron Collider has transformed our understanding of physics since it began operating in 2008, enabling researchers to investigate the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Some 100 meters below the border between France and Switzerland, particles accelerate along the LHC’s 27-kilometer circumference, nearly reaching the speed of light before smashing together.
The LHC is often described as the biggest machine ever built. And while the physicists who carry out experiments at the facility tend to garner most of the attention, it takes
hundreds of engineers and technicians to keep the LHC running. One such engineer is Irene Degl’Innocenti, who works in digital electronics at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates the LHC. As a member of CERN’s beam instrumentation group, Degl’Innocenti creates custom electronics that measure the position of the particle beams as they travel.
Irene Degl’Innocenti
Employer:
CERN
Occupation:
Digital electronics engineer
Education:
Bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering; Ph.D. in electrical, electronics, and communications engineering, University of Pisa, in Italy
“It’s a huge machine that does very challenging things, so the amount of expertise needed is vast,” Degl’Innocenti says.
The electronics she works on make up only a tiny part of the overall operation, something Degl’Innocenti is keenly aware of when she descends into the LHC’s cavernous tunnels to install or test her equipment. But she gets great satisfaction from working on such an important endeavor.
“You’re part of something that is very huge,” she says. “You feel part of this big community trying to understand what is actually going on in the universe, and that is very fascinating.”
Opportunities to Work in High-energy Physics
Growing up in Italy, Degl’Innocenti wanted to be a novelist. Throughout high school she leaned toward the humanities, but she had a natural affinity for math, thanks in part to her mother, who is a science teacher.
“I’m a very analytical person, and that has always been part of my mind-set, but I just didn’t find math charming when I was little,” Degl’Innocenti says. “It took a while to realize the opportunities it could open up.”
She started exploring electronics around age 17 because it seemed like the most direct way to translate her logical, mathematical way of thinking into a career. In 2011, she enrolled in
the University of Pisa, in Italy, earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 2014 and staying on to earn a master’s degree in the same subject.
At the time, Degl’Innocenti had no idea there were opportunities for engineers to work in high-energy physics. But she learned that a fellow student had attended a summer internship at
Fermilab, the participle physics and accelerator laboratory in Batavia, Ill. So she applied for and won an internship there in 2015. Since Fermilab and CERN closely collaborate, she was able to help design a data-processing board for LHC’s Compact Muon Solenoid experiment.
Next she looked for an internship closer to home and discovered CERN’s
technical student program, which allows students to work on a project over the course of a year. Working in the beam-instrumentation group, Degl’Innocenti designed a digital-acquisition system that became the basis for her master’s thesis.
Measuring the Position of Particle Beams
After receiving her master’s in 2017, Degl’Innocenti went on to pursue a Ph.D., also at the University of Pisa. She conducted her research at CERN’s beam-position section, which builds equipment to measure the position of particle beams within CERN’s accelerator complex. The LHC has roughly 1,000 monitors spaced around the accelerator ring. Each monitor typically consists of two pairs of sensors positioned on opposite sides of the accelerator pipe, and it is possible to measure the beam’s horizontal and vertical positions by comparing the strength of the signal at each sensor.
The underlying concept is simple, Degl’Innocenti says, but these measurements must be precise. Bunches of particles pass through the monitors every 25 nanoseconds, and their position must be tracked to within 50 micrometers.
“We start developing a system years in advance, and then it has to work for a couple of decades.”
Most of the signal processing is normally done in analog, but during her Ph.D., she focused on shifting as much of this work as possible to the digital domain because analog circuits are finicky, she says. They need to be precisely calibrated, and their accuracy tends to drift over time or when temperatures fluctuate.
“It’s complex to maintain,” she says. “It becomes particularly tricky when you have 1,000 monitors, and they are located in an accelerator 100 meters underground.”
Information is lost when analog is converted to digital, however, so Degl’Innocenti analyzed the performance of the latest analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and investigated their effect on position measurements.
Designing Beam-Monitor Electronics
After completing her Ph.D. in electrical, electronics, and communications engineering in 2021, Degl’Innocenti joined CERN as a senior postdoctoral fellow. Two years later, she became a full-time employee there, applying the results of her research to developing new hardware. She’s currently designing a new beam-position monitor for the
High-Luminosity upgrade to the LHC, expected to be completed in 2028. This new system will likely use a system-on-chip to house most of the electronics, including several ADCs and a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) that Degl’Innocenti will program to run a new digital signal-processing algorithm.
She’s part of a team of just 15 who handle design, implementation, and ongoing maintenance of CERN’s beam-position monitors. So she works closely with the engineers who design sensors and software for those instruments and the physicists who operate the accelerator and set the instruments’ requirements.
“We start developing a system years in advance, and then it has to work for a couple of decades,” Degl’Innocenti says.
Opportunities in High-Energy Physics
High-energy physics has a variety of interesting opportunities for engineers, Degl’Innocenti says, including high-precision electronics, vacuum systems, and cryogenics.
“The machines are very large and very complex, but we are looking at very small things,” she says. “There are a lot of big numbers involved both at the large scale and also when it comes to precision on the small scale.”
FPGA design skills are in high demand at all kinds of research facilities, and embedded systems are also becoming more important, Degl’Innocenti says. The key is keeping an open mind about where to apply your engineering knowledge, she says. She never thought there would be opportunities for people with her skill set at CERN.
“Always check what technologies are being used,” she advises. “Don’t limit yourself by assuming that working somewhere would not be possible.”
This article appears in the August 2024 print issue as “Irene Degl’Innocenti.”
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