February 2006, Issue #46
Feature Story: Women in Engineering
JETS joins with E-Week in celebrating women in engineering during the month of February. Our feature story of the month highlights the many achievements of women in engineering as presented in the book “Our Changing World: True Stories of Women Engineers.” This book was developed and published as a collaborative effort among major engineering society presidents, who for the first time in history, were all women. Their work on the project has been formalized into the Extraordinary Women Engineers Projects for which First Lady Laura Bush serves as honorary chair. For more information on the project, visit www.engineeringwomen.org.
To capture the richness and diversity of contributions of women in engineering, the following internet scavenger hunt provides information as well and an opportunity to discover women’s contributions on your own. Provided below is a small sampling of the hundreds of stories of women engineers and their contributions detailed in the book.
Internet Scavenger Hunt: Provided below are statements about a woman engineer and work in a field. Click on the link in the name to learn how each woman’s contributions and discoveries are being used to help people. All examples are taken from the Extraordinary Women Engineers Projects book and links to pdfs of the corresponding section of the book are provided.
For the answers, click on the answer key at the bottom of the page.
- Susan Margulies has been conducting research on young children whose brain tissue and skull stiffness is very different from adults.
- Treena Livingston Arinzeh is a rising star in the field of tissue engineering. She has found that calcium and phosphorous can be made into a porous scaffold resembling a hard sponge. When stem cells sitting on the sponge are injected into lab animals, new bone cells form within four to six weeks.
- Jennifer West has developed nanoshells, teeny-tiny particles with optical (light) properties that can burn out tumors.
- Danielle Julie Carrier is researching the use of “phytochemicals”—the chemicals that naturally occur in plants.
- Marybeth Lima is examining different varieties of rice of part of the bran layer to determine where the most antioxidants—agents that help repair cells in the body—are found.
- Barbara Fox, civil engineer. In the early 1991s, she overcame one of the greatest challenges to the City of Chicago’s water supply.
- Barbara E. Featherston developed a water treatment program using ozone instead of chlorine.
- Cheryl Phanstiel Ulrich is working to mimic water flow once natural in the Everglades.
- Diane Dorland has become a pollution private investigator.
- Sian E. M. Jenkins is a biomechanical engineer who employs her love of horses in the movies.
- Padmasree Warrior is Motorolla’s chief technology officer. Together with her team of 25,000 scientists and engineers she’s working to create technology breakthroughs for what she calls “seamless mobility.”
Click here for the answers.
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