It is truly an honor to receive the Sarah Goddard Power award from the Academic Women's Conference and the Center for the Education of Women+. I follow many amazing women engineers who are an inspiration to me – including past winners Jenna Wiens, Valeria Bertacco, Rada Milhalcea, Dawn Tilbury, and Martha Pollack. I can only strive to make an impact on as many lives as these women have, inspiring women to bring their skills and voices into engineering. Right now this work is critically important in my field, as technology in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computing changes our world on a daily basis. Technology is often thought of as an objective pursuit, where the goals are clear and well-defined, and only those who are “math geniuses” can make a contribution. This couldn’t be further from the truth – we are constantly defining the goals and values of our technology, and diverse voices are key to creating technology that lifts us up as a whole society.
I have been studying or practicing engineering and computer science since I became an electrical engineering major as a freshman in college. I was very lucky early in this career to have some of the most compassionate and supportive male engineers as my educators and bosses. [Thank you especially: Don Johnson, Rich Baraniuk, Rob Nowak, Ed Knightly, John Treichler, and Mani Srivastava! What an impressive list of strong mentors I had before I even started my PhD.] They saw an ability in me that went beyond book learning, and they encouraged me to cultivate it. Without them I would definitely not be here today. At the same time, I have to point out that I had not a single female professor in any of my technical classes until my second semester of PhD. For years I had been telling people that I had supportive male professors who inspired me to be a professor. But it was Gloria Mari-Beffa, my math professor at the University of Wisconsin, who showed me that this dream was a reality. It's really hard to understand the power of role models who "look like you" until you experience it yourself. [I absolutely loved that she wore barettes in her hair. It made me feel like I could wear barettes and be a professor, too! And the way she supported me, as an engineer in her math class. Ask me for another story about her if you're curious.] Having Gloria as a professor created a desire in me to use my career to be that role model -- to find the young women who have the ability, and give them the confidence to keep going.
I want to tell you a little about two important women in my life -- my grandmothers. Neither of my grandmothers had schooling past high school, but both of them took work very seriously. My mom's mom was the only person in her family who had a job during the great depression, working at a doctor's office. She was married at age 25 and had three children under three years old when my grandfather was shipped to Europe in WW2. While she would have liked to work when they were older, my grandfather expected her to do all the work at home on top of any other work, and so she never tried. But she pushed her own three daughters in their schooling, and made sure they all went to college.
My dad's mom was very good at math. She tutored other kids in her school. She wanted to go to college, but her father didn't think that was a good idea, so she got a job in retail. She was married at age 26 and had two sons. When my dad was 12, she took a class in the comptometer, a specialized computing device that was used in many financial fields. Then without telling my grandfather, she went to apply for jobs at the banks in downtown Cleveland. She told me this story many times. She went to each one with her credentials, and one by one they turned her down. One of them told her straight away that she was too old (at 42 years old). As she approached the last bank, Key Bank, she thought to herself she might as well not even try. She crossed the street to head back home, changed her mind and crossed back again, crossing the street three times before she finally walked in. They hired her and she worked there for 20 years. Her boss always bragged about how lucky he was that he found her.
Both my grandmothers encouraged me to study hard and go to college. My mother saw that I was good in math and found ways to encourage me every step of the way. My mother is the most important woman in my life, and she certainly has her own story, but for me her biggest gift was this encouragement. In 8th grade I took an advanced math class at the high school, and there were many 8th grade girls in that class. But the teacher would try to trip us up, and he would high-five with boys when girls got answers wrong. It really ticked me off, but I always got the answers right [lucky breaks] so I didn’t have the wherewithal to see it for the discrimination it was. When I was deciding what high school to attend, my mom met all the math teachers at that public school. They were all age 60+ white men. So she gently steered me toward a private school, which happened to have one of the state's most decorated female math teachers. I loved her class and I flourished. [Thank you Ms. Hund, now Mrs. Radiel!]
When I was thinking about what I wanted to do in college, my mom said I could do anything but nursing and teaching. I could be a doctor or a professor or anything else, but since she was only allowed to do nursing and teaching, she wanted me to consider a broader range of options.
Today, less than 10% of electrical engineering professionals are women. Our undergraduate program has under 25% women, and our faculty has 15% women. I wish I could tell you these numbers have changed in the 25 years since I started college, but they have not. But there are pockets of hope -- I see many of my college female friends excelling in their careers, starting companies, and encouraging more women to join them. In today's climate, this work is so critical. There are many girls and young women who are capable of becoming the country's best engineers if simply given opportunities and encouragement.
I would like to thank my colleagues here at Michigan who have been so supportive of me, especially Jeff Fessler, Herb Winful, and Fred Terry who graciously nominated me for the award, as well as the staff Shelly Feldkamp and Kathy Austin [and Beth Lawson, who provided strong guidance for me at the very start of my faculty career], who do such a great job supporting the faculty in our area. Thank you to my cohort of amazing female colleagues who provided a community for me in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science: Johanna Mathieu, Emily Mower-Provost, Necmiye Ozay, and Jenna Wiens. And finally, I want to thank my husband and daughter who are here today. My husband supports me in every way possible, and I know his pride in my work shines through to our two beautiful daughters. And I am of course so proud of my daughters, who give me hope for the future. My daughter made me this bracelet, which I wear to remind myself of my motivation to leave a better world for all our children. Thank you again for this honor.