Women in PEMD

Session 4.1 - Women in PEMD
This special session will offer a series of short presentations from leading women engineers from a range of levels, backgrounds and disciplines, and it will explore the various pathways and challenges women engineers have to navigate.

Continent Hopping - Literally and Figuratively

Academics are expected to make themselves at home internationally. This often comes along with an international education and career, and frequent relocation in the early stages of the career; later, it translates into "relocating" between international working matters, national job requirements, and -- typically -- increasing demands of family matters. In this talk, I would like to share with you my excitement about the recurring need to find ways through this territory.

Annette Muetze, Head of Electric Drives and Machines, Institute bei Technische Universität Graz, Austria

Empowering Women Engineers: A review of industry and academia

With background in both academia and industry, I will share my experience in this WiPEMD session and discuss the challenges and opportunities women engineers commonly face.

Zhengyang (Jenny) Feng, Research Engineer, Toshiba, UK

Women in engineering: challenges and experiences of working in male-dominated field

The focus of the presentation will be the challenges faced by women in the engineering industry. The first part will provide a brief overview of my journey to become an engineer and my career as a power electronics engineer, offering technical insight into the projects I was involved in. These projects include developing a 500kW universal drive as well as designing and developing a four-quadrant drive for lift applications.

The second part will draw on my personal experiences in both academia and industry and will focus on challenges faced by women in male dominated field of engineering. One of which is underrepresentation, especially in more senior positions (currently, only 11% of the British engineering workforce is female)

Nika Piekut, Power electronics engineer, Nidec Control Techniques, UK

Triumphs, Trials, Barriers and Breakthroughs: Reflections from my Research Journey

In this short talk, I will share and reflect on some of the challenges and successes of my research journey. I will share my nerdy passions, research-adjacent activities and collaborations, and how I have found ways to integrate them together. I will also touch on the pivotal experiences and leaps of faith which have shaped and helped me. I will try to draw out some themes which I hope will strike a chord with the researcher community and create space for conversations about how to move things forward: themes including precarity, research culture, microaggressions, parenthood, and the pandemic. I will end with sharing some of my own hopes and development goals, including trying to master the art of repurposing unsuccessful grant applications!

Pearl Agyakwa, Anne McLaren Fellow, University of Nottingham, UK