2025-11-29 21:00:02
According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration records, in an average year over 2,500 medical device recalls are issued in the United States. Some of these recalls simply require checking the device for problems, but others require the return or destruction of the device. Once identified, the FDA categorizes the root cause of these recalls into 40 categories, plus a catchall of “other”: situations that include labeling mix-ups, problems with expiration dates, and counterfeiting.
What’s shown here is the breakdown of the five biggest problem categories found among the 56,000 entries in the FDA medical-recall database, which stretches back to 2002: device design, process control (meaning an error in the device’s manufacturing process), nonconforming material/component (meaning something does not meet required specifications), software issues, and packaging.
Software issues are broken down into six root causes, with software design far and away the biggest problem. The other five are, in order: change control; software design changes; software manufacturing or deployment problems; software design issues in the manufacturing process; and software in the “use environment.” That last one includes cybersecurity issues, or problems with supporting software, such as a smartphone app.
This article appears in the December 2025 print issue as “Medical Device Recalls.”
2025-11-29 03:00:02
The EPICS (Engineering Projects in Community Service) in IEEE initiative had a record year in 2025, funding 48 projects involving nearly 1,000 students from 17 countries. The IEEE Educational Activities program approved the most projects this year, distributing US $290,000 in funding and engaging more students than ever before in innovative, hands-on engineering systems.
The program offers students opportunities to engage in service learning and collaborate with engineering professionals and community organizations to develop solutions that address local community challenges. The projects undertaken by IEEE groups encompass student branches, sections, society chapters, and affinity groups including Women in Engineering and Young Professionals.
EPICS in IEEE provides funding up to $10,000, along with resources and mentorship, for projects focused on four key areas of community improvement: education and outreach, environment, access and abilities, and human services.
This year, EPICS partnered with four IEEE societies and the IEEE Standards Association on 23 of the 48 approved projects. The Antennas and Propagation Society supported three, the Industry Applications Society (IAS) funded nine, the Instrumentation and Measurement Society (IMS) sponsored five, the Robotics and Automation Society supported two, the Solid State Circuits Society (SSCS) provided funding for three, and the IEEE Standards Association sponsored one.
The stories of the partner-funded projects demonstrate the impact and the effect the projects have on the students and their communities.
The IAS student branch at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Colombia worked on a project that involved water storage, automated irrigation, and waste management. The goal was to transform the Matoruco agroecological garden at the Institución Educativa Los Garzones into a more lively, sustainable, and accessible space.
These EPICS in IEEE team members from the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Colombia are configuring a radio communications network that will send data to an online dashboard showing the solar power usage, pump status, and soil moisture for the Matoruco agroecological garden at the Institución Educativa Los Garzones. EPICS in IEEE
By using an irrigation automation system, electric pump control, and soil moisture monitoring, the team aimed to show how engineering concepts combine academic knowledge and practical application. The initiative uses monocrystalline solar panels for power, a programmable logic controller to automatically manage pumps and valves, soil moisture sensors for real-time data, and a LoRa One network (a proprietary radio communication system based on spread spectrum modulation) to send data to an online dashboard showing solar power usage, pump status, and soil moisture.
Los Garzones preuniversity students were taught about the irrigation system through hands-on projects, received training on organic waste management from university students, and participated in installation activities. The university team also organizes garden cleanup events to engage younger students with the community garden.
“We seek to generate a true sense of belonging by offering students and faculty a gathering place for hands-on learning and shared responsibility,” says Rafael Gustavo Ramos Noriega, the team lead and fourth-year electronics engineering student. “By integrating technical knowledge with fun activities and training sessions, we empower the community to keep the garden alive and continue improving it.
“This project has been an unmatched platform for preparing me for a professional career,” he added. “By leading everything from budget planning to the final installation, I have experienced firsthand all the stages of a real engineering project: scope definition, resource management, team coordination, troubleshooting, and delivering tangible results. All of this reinforces my goal of dedicating myself to research and development in automation and embedded systems and contributing innovation in the agricultural and environmental sectors to help more communities and make my mark.”
The project received $7,950 from IAS.
Students give a tour of the systems they installed at the Matoruco agroecological garden.
More than 1.5 million individuals in Pakistan are blind, including thousands of children who face barriers to accessing essential learning resources, according to the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness. To address the need for accessible learning tools, a student team from the Mehran University of Engineering and Technology (MUET) and the IEEE Karachi Section created BrailleGenAI: Empowering Braille Learning With Edge AI and Voice Interaction.
The interactive system for blind children combines edge artificial intelligence, generative AI, and embedded systems, says Kainat Fizzah Muhammad, a project leader and electrical engineering student at MUET. The system uses a camera to recognize tactile braille blocks and provide real-time audio feedback via text-to-speech technology. It includes gamified modules designed to support literacy, numeracy, logical reasoning, and voice recognition.
The team partnered with the Hands Welfare Foundation, a nonprofit in Pakistan that focuses on inclusive education, disability empowerment, and community development. The team collaborated with the Ida Rieu School, part of the Ida Rieu Welfare Association, which serves the visually and hearing impaired.
“These partnerships have been instrumental in helping us plan outreach activities, gather input from experts and caregivers, and prepare for usability testing across diverse environments,” says Attiya Baqai, a professor in the MUET electronic engineering department. Support from the Hands foundation ensured the solution was shaped by the real-world needs of the visually impaired community.
SSCS provided $9,155 in funding.
The student team shows how the smart braille system they developed works.
Macedonia’s capital, Skopje, is among Europe’s most polluted cities, particularly in winter, due to thick smog caused by temperature changes, according to the World Health Organization. The WHO reports that the city’s air contains particles that can cause health issues without early warning signs—known as silent killers.
A team at Sts. Cyril and Methodius University created a system to measure and publicize local air pollution levels through its What We Breathe project. It aims to raise awareness and improve health outcomes, particularly among the city’s children.
“Our goal is to provide people with information on current pollution levels so they can make informed decisions regarding their exposure and take protective measures,” says Andrej Ilievski, an IEEE student member majoring in computer hardware engineering and electronics. “We chose to focus on schools first because children’s lungs and immune systems are still developing, making them one of our population’s most vulnerable demographics.”
The project involved 10 university students working with high schools, faculty, and the Society of Environmental Engineers of Macedonia to design and build a sensing and display tool that communicates via the Internet.
“By leading everything from budget planning to the final installation, I have experienced firsthand all the stages of a real engineering project: scope definition, resource management, team coordination, troubleshooting, and delivering tangible results.” —Rafael Gustavo Ramos Noriega
“Our sensing unit detects particulate matter, temperature, and humidity,” says project leader Josif Kjosev, an electronics professor at the university. “It then transmits that data through a Wi-Fi connection to a public server every 5 minutes, while our display unit retrieves the data from the server.”
“Since deploying the system,” Ilievski says, “everyone on the team has been enthusiastic about how well the project connects with their high school audience.”
The team says it hopes students will continue to work on new versions of the devices and provide them to other interested schools in the area.
“For most of my life, my academic success has been on paper,” Ilievski says. “But thanks to our EPICS in IEEE project, I finally have a real, physical object that I helped create.
“We’re grateful for the opportunity to make this project a reality and be part of something bigger.”
The project received $8,645 from the IMS.
Thanks to partnerships with IEEE societies, EPICS can provide more opportunities to students around the world. The program also includes mentors from societies and travel grants for conferences, enhancing the student experience.
The collaborations motivate students to apply technologies in the IEEE societies’ areas of interest to real-world problems, helping them improve their communities and fostering continued engagement with the society and IEEE.
You can learn how to get involved with EPICS by visiting its website.
2025-11-28 21:00:02
For years, Gwen Shaffer has been leading Long Beach, Calif. residents on “data walks,” pointing out public Wi-Fi routers, security cameras, smart water meters, and parking kiosks. The goal, according to the professor of journalism and public relations at California State University, Long Beach, was to learn how residents felt about the ways in which their city collected data on them.
Gwen Shaffer is a professor of journalism and public relations at California State University, Long Beach. She is the principal investigator on a National Science Foundation–funded project aimed at providing Long Beach residents with greater agency over the personal data their city collects.
She also identified a critical gap in smart city design today: While cities may disclose how they collect data, they rarely offer ways to opt out. Shaffer spoke with IEEE Spectrum about the experience of leading data walks, and about her research team’s efforts to give citizens more control over the data collected by public technologies.
What was the inspiration for your data walks?
Gwen Shaffer: I began facilitating data walks in 2021. I was studying residents’ comfort levels with city-deployed technologies that collect personally identifiable information. My first career as a political reporter has influenced my research approach. I feel strongly about conducting applied rather than theoretical research. And I always go into a study with the goal of helping to solve a real-world challenge and inform policy.
How did you organize the walks?
Shaffer: We posted data privacy labels with a QR code that residents can scan and find out how their data are being used. Downtown, they’re in Spanish and English. In Cambodia Town, we did them in Khmer and English.
What happened during the walks?
Shaffer: I’ll give you one example. In a couple of the city-owned parking garages, there are automated license-plate readers at the entrance. So when I did the data walks, I talked to our participants about how they feel about those scanners. Because once they have your license plate, if you’ve parked for fewer than two hours, you can breeze right through. You don’t owe money.
Responses were contextual and sometimes contradictory. There were residents who said, “Oh, yeah. That’s so convenient. It’s a time saver.” So I think that shows how residents are willing to make trade-offs. Intellectually, they hate the idea of the privacy violation, but they also love convenience.
What surprised you most?
Shaffer: One of the participants said, “When I go to the airport, I can opt out of the facial scan and still be able to get on the airplane. But if I want to participate in so many activities in the city and not have my data collected, there’s no option.”
There was a cyberattack against the city in November 2023. Even though we didn’t have a prompt asking about it, people brought it up on their own in almost every focus group. One said, “I would never connect to public Wi-Fi, especially after the city of Long Beach’s site was hacked.”
What is the app your team is developing?
Shaffer: Residents want agency. So that’s what led my research team to connect with privacy engineers at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. Norman Sadeh and his team had developed what they called the IoT Assistant. So I told them about our project, and proposed adapting their app for city-deployed technologies. Our plan is to give residents the opportunity to exercise their rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act with this app. So they could say, “Passport Parking app, delete all the data you’ve already collected on me. And don’t collect any more in the future.”
This article appears in the December 2025 print issue as “Gwen Shaffer.”
2025-11-27 23:00:01
From the honey in your tea to the blood in your veins, materials all around you have a hidden talent. Some of these substances, when engineered in specific ways, can act as memristors—electrical components that can “remember” past states.
Memristors are often used in chips that both perform computations and store data. They are devices that store data as particular levels of resistance. Today, they are constructed as a thin layer of titanium dioxide or similar dielectric material sandwiched between two metal electrodes. Applying enough voltage to the device causes tiny regions in the dielectric layer—where oxygen atoms are missing—to form filaments that bridge the electrodes or otherwise move in a way that makes the layer more conductive. Reversing the voltage undoes the process. Thus, the process essentially gives the memristor a memory of past electrical activity.
Last month, while exploring the electrical properties of fungi, a group at The Ohio State University found first-hand that some organic memristors have benefits beyond those made with conventional materials. Not only can shiitake act as a memristor, for example, but it may be useful in aerospace or medical applications because the fungus demonstrates high levels of radiation resistance. The project “really mushroomed into something cool,” lead researcher John LaRocco says with a smirk.
Researchers have learned that other unexpected materials may give memristors an edge. They may be more flexible than typical memristors or even biodegradable. Here’s how they’ve made memristors from strange materials, and the potential benefits these odd devices could bring:
LaRocco and his colleagues were searching for a proxy for brain circuitry to use in electrical stimulation research when they stumbled upon something interesting—shiitake mushrooms are capable of learning in a way that’s similar to memristors.
The group set out to evaluate just how well shiitake can remember electrical states by first cultivating nine samples and curating optimal growing conditions, including feeding them a mix of farro, wheat, and hay.
Once fully matured, the mushrooms were dried and rehydrated to a level that made them moderately conductive. In this state, the fungi’s structure includes conductive pathways that emulate the oxygen vacancies in commercial memristors. The scientists plugged them into circuits and put them through voltage, frequency, and memory tests. The result? Mushroom memristors.
It may smell “kind of funny,” LaRocco says, but shiitake performs surprisingly well when compared to conventional memristors. Around 90 percent of the time, the fungus maintains ideal memristor-like behavior for signals up to 5.85 kilohertz. While traditional materials can function at frequencies orders of magnitude faster, these numbers are notable for biological materials, he says.
What fungi lack in performance, they may make up for in other properties. For one, many mushrooms—including shiitake—are highly resistant to radiation and other environmental dangers. “They’re growing in logs in Fukushima and a lot of very rough parts of the world, so that’s one of the appeals,” LaRocco says.
Shiitake are also an environmentally-friendly option that’s already commercialized. “They’re already cultured in large quantities,” LaRocco explains. “One could simply leverage existing logistics chains” if the industry wanted to commercialize mushroom memristors. The use cases for this product would be niche, he thinks, and would center around the radiation resistance that shiitake boasts. Mushroom GPUs are unlikely, LaRocco says, but he sees potential for aerospace and medical applications.
In 2022, engineers at Washington State University interested in green electronics set out to study if honey could serve as a good memristor. “Modern electronics generate 50 million tons of e-waste annually, with only about 20 percent recycled,” says Feng Zhao, who led the work and is now at Missouri University of Science and Technology. “Honey offers a biodegradable alternative.”
The researchers first blended commercial honey with water and stored it in a vacuum to remove air bubbles. They then spread the mixture on a piece of copper, baked the whole stack at 90 °C for nine hours to stabilize it, and, finally, capped it with circular copper electrodes on top—completing the honey-based memristor sandwich.
The resulting 2.5-micrometer-thick honey layer acted like oxide dielectric in conventional memristors: a place for conductive pathways to form and dissolve, changing resistance with voltage. In this setup, when voltage is applied, copper filaments extend through the honey.
The honey-based memristor was able to switch from low to high resistance in 500 nanoseconds and back to low in 100 nanoseconds, which is comparable to speeds in some non-food-based memristive materials.
One advantage of honey is that it’s “cheap and widely available, making it an attractive candidate for scalable fabrication,” Zhao says. It’s also “fully biodegradable and dissolves in water, showing zero toxic waste.” In the 2022 paper, though, the researchers note that for a honey-based device to be truly biodegradable, the copper components would need to be replaced with dissolvable metals. They suggest options like magnesium and tungsten, but also write that the performance of memristors made from these metals is still “under investigation.”
Considering it a potential means of delivering healthcare, a group in India wondered if blood would make a good memristor in 2011, just three years after the first memristor was built.
The experiments were pretty simple. The researchers filled a test tube with fresh, type O+ human blood and inserted two conducting wire probes. The wires were connected with a power supply, creating a complete circuit, and voltages of one, two, and three volts were applied in repeated steps. Then, to test the memristor-qualities of blood as it exists in the human body, the researchers set up a “flow mode” that applied voltage to the blood as it flowed from a tube at up to one drop per second.
The experiments were preliminary and only measured current passing through the blood, but resistance could be set by applying voltage. Crucially, resistance changed by less than 10 percent in the 30 minute period after voltage was applied. In the International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics, the scientists wrote that, because of these observations, their contraption “looks like a human blood memristor.”
2025-11-27 21:00:02
Early in Levi Unema’s career as an electrical engineer, he was presented with an unusual opportunity. While working on assembly lines at an automotive parts supplier in 2015, he got a surprise call from his high-school science teacher that set him off on an entirely new path: piloting underwater robots to explore the ocean’s deepest abysses.
That call came from Harlan Kredit, a nationally renowned science teacher and board member of a Rhode Island-based nonprofit called the Global Foundation for Ocean Exploration (GFOE). The organization was looking for an electrical engineer to help design, build, and pilot remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Employer
Deep Exploration Solutions
Occupation
ROV engineer
Education
Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, Michigan Technological University
This was an exciting break for Unema, a Washington state native who had grown up tinkering with electronics and exploring the outdoors. Unema joined the team in early 2016 and has since helped develop and operate deep-sea robots for scientific expeditions around the globe.
The GFOE’s contract with NOAA expired in July, forcing the engineering team to disband. But soon after, Unema teamed up with four former colleagues to start their own ROV consultancy, called Deep Exploration Solutions, to continue the work he’s so passionate about.
“I love the exploration and just seeing new things every day,” he says. “And the engineering challenges that go along with it are really exciting, because there’s a lot of pressure down there and a lot of technical problems to solve.”
Unema’s fascination with electronics started early. Growing up in Lynden, Wash., he took apart radios, modified headphones, and hacked together USB chargers from AA batteries. “I’ve always had to know how things work,” he says. He was also a Boy Scout, and much of his youth was spent hiking, camping, and snowboarding.
That love of both technology and nature can be traced back, at least in part, to his parents—his father was a civil engineer, and his mother was a high-school biology teacher. But another major influence growing up was Kredit, the science teacher who went on to recruit him. (Kredit was also a colleague of Unema’s mother.)
Kredit has won numerous awards for his work as an educator, including the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science Teaching in 2004. Like Unema, he also shares a love for the outdoors as Yellowstone National Park’s longest-serving park ranger. “He was an excellent science teacher, very inspiring,” says Unema.
When Unema graduated high school in 2010, he decided to enroll at his father’s alma mater, Michigan Technological University, to study engineering. He was initially unsure what discipline to follow and signed up for the general engineering course, but he quickly settled on electrical engineering.
A summer internship at a steel mill run by the multinational corporation ArcelorMittal introduced Unema to factory automation and assembly lines. After graduating in 2014 he took a job at Gentex Corp. in Zeeland, Mich., where he worked on manufacturing systems and industrial robotics.
In late 2015, he got the call from Kredit asking if he’d be interested in working on underwater robots for GFOE. The role involved not just engineering these systems, but also piloting them. Taking the plunge was a difficult choice, says Unema, as he’d just been promoted at Gentex. But the promise of travel combined with the novel engineering challenges made it too good an opportunity to turn down.
Building technology that can withstand the crushing pressure at the bottom of the ocean is tough, he says, and you have to make trade-offs between weight, size, and cost. Everything has to be waterproof, and electronics have to be carefully isolated to prevent them from grounding on the ocean floor. Some components are pressure-tolerant, but most must be stored in pressurized titanium flasks, so the components must be extremely small to minimize the size of the metallic housing.
Unema conducts predive checks from the Okeanos Explorer’s control room. Once the ROV is launched, scientists will watch the camera feeds and advise his team where to direct the vehicle.Art Howard
“You’re working very closely with the mechanical engineer to fit the electronics in a really small space,” he says. “The smaller the cylinder is, the cheaper it is, but also the less mass on the vehicle. Every bit of mass means more buoyancy is required, so you want to keep things small, keep things light.”
Communications are another challenge. The ROVs rely on several kilometers of cable containing just three single-mode optical fibers. “All the communication needs to come together and then go up one cable,” Unema says. “And every year new instruments consume more data.”
He works exclusively on ROVs that are custom made for scientific research, which require smoother control and considerably more electronics and instrumentation than the heavier-duty vehicles used by the oil and gas industry. “The science ones are all hand-built, they’re all quirky,” he says.
Unema’s role spans the full life cycle of an ROV’s design, construction, and operation. He primarily spends winters upgrading and maintaining vehicles and summers piloting them on expeditions. At GFOE, he mainly worked on two ROVs for NOAA called Deep Discoverer and Seirios, which operate from the ship Okeanos Explorer. But he has also piloted ROVs for other organizations over the years, including the Schmidt Ocean Institute and the Ocean Exploration Trust.
Unema’s new consultancy, Deep Exploration Solutions, has been given a contract to do the winter maintenance on the NOAA ROVs, and the firm is now on the lookout for more ROV design and upgrade work, as well as piloting jobs.
On expeditions, Unema is responsible for driving the robot. He follows instructions from a science team that watches the ROV’s video feed to identify things like corals, sponges, or deepwater creatures that they’d like to investigate in more detail. Sometimes he will also operate hydraulic arms to sample particularly interesting finds.
In general, the missions are aimed at discovering new species and mapping the range of known ones, says Unema. “There’s a lot of the bottom of the ocean where we don’t know anything about it,” he says. “Basically every expedition there’s some new species.”
This involves being at sea for weeks at a time. Unema says that life aboard ships can be challenging—many new crew members get seasick, and you spend almost a month living in close quarters with people you’ve often never met before. But he enjoys the opportunity to meet colleagues from a wide variety of backgrounds who are all deeply enthusiastic about the mission.
“It’s like when you go to scout camp or summer camp,” he says. “You’re all meeting new people. Everyone’s really excited to be there. We don’t know what we’re going to find.”
Unema also relishes the challenge of solving engineering problems with the limited resources available on the ship. “We’re going out to the middle of the Pacific,” he says. “Things break, and you’ve got to fix them with what you have out there.”
If that sounds more exciting than daunting, and you’re interested in working with ROVs, Unema’s main advice is to talk to engineers in the field. It’s a small but friendly community, he says, so just do your research to see what opportunities are available. Some groups, such as the Ocean Exploration Trust, also operate internships for college students to help them get experience in the field.
And Unema says there are very few careers quite like it. “I love it because I get to do all aspects of engineering—from idea to operations,” he says. “To be able to take something I worked on and use it in the field is really rewarding.”
This article appears in the December 2025 print issue as “Levi Unema.”
2025-11-27 03:00:01
The percentage of women working in science, technology, engineering, and math fields continues to remain stubbornly low. Women made up 28 percent of the STEM global workforce last year, according to the World Economic Forum.
IEEE and many other organizations conduct outreach programs targeting preuniversity girls and college-age women, and studies show that one of the most powerful ways to encourage girls to consider a STEM career is by introducing them to female role models in such fields. The exposure can provide the girls with insights, guidance, and advice on how to succeed in STEM.
To provide a venue to connect young girls with members working in STEM, IEEE partnered with the Girl Scouts of the United States of America’s Heart of New Jersey (GSHNJ) council and its See Her, Be Her career exploration program. Now in its eighth year, the annual event—which used to be called What a G.I.R.L. Can Be—provides an opportunity for girls to learn about STEM careers by participating in hands-on activities, playing games, and questioning professionals at the exhibits.
This year’s event was held in May at Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, N.J. Volunteers from the IEEE North Jersey Section and the IEEE Technical Activities Future Networks technical community were among the 30 exhibitors. More than 100 girls attended.
“IEEE and the Girl Scouts share a view that STEM fields require a diversity of thought, experience, and backgrounds to be able to use technology to better the world,” says IEEE Member Craig Polk, senior program manager for the technical community. He helped coordinate the See Her, Be Her event.
“We know that there’s a shortage of girls and women in STEM careers,” adds Johanna Nurjahan, girl experience manager for the Heart of New Jersey council. “We are really trying to create that pipeline, which is needed to ensure that the number of women in STEM tracks upward.”
The Girl Scouts organization focuses on helping girls build courage, confidence, and character. The program is based on four pillars: life skills, outdoor skills, entrepreneurship, and STEM.
“We offer girls a wide range of experiences that empower them to take charge of their future, explore their interests, and discover the joy of learning new skills,” Nurjahan says. “As they grow and progress through the program, they continue developing and refining skills that build courage, confidence, and character—qualities that prepare them to make the world a better place. Everything we do helps lay a strong foundation for leadership.”
The partnership between IEEE and the Girl Scouts began shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in 2020. Volunteers from IEEE sections worked with IEEE TryEngineering to bring resources to areas that had not historically been represented in STEM, Polk says.
Trinity Zang, a laboratory manager at Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Essex County, N.J.shows a Girl Scout Brownie how to transfer liquid samples using pipettes.GSHNJ
During that same period, the Girl Scouts were increasing their involvement in STEM-related programs. They worked with U.S. IEEE sections to conduct hands-on activities at schools. They also held career fairs and created STEM badges. The collaboration has grown since then.
“IEEE has always been a fantastic partner,” Nurjahan says. “They’re always willing to aid us as we work to get more girls engaged in STEM.”
IEEE first got involved with the See Her, Be Her career fair in May 2024, which was also held at Stevens Tech.
“Being able to introduce engineering and STEM to possible future innovators and leaders helps grow the understanding of how societal problems can be solved,” Polk says. “IEEE also benefits by having a new generation knowing who we are and what our charitable organization is doing to improve humanity through technology.”
“See Her, Be Her gives girls the chance to see women leading in nontraditional careers and inspires them to dream bigger, challenge limits, and believe they can do anything they set their minds to,” Nurjahan says. “It’s about showing them that every path is open to them. They just have to go for it.”
One of the volunteers who participated in this year’s career fair was IEEE Senior Member Gautami Nadkarni. A cloud architect, she’s a senior customer engineer with Google in New York City.
“I’m very passionate about diversity, equity, and inclusion and other such initiatives because I believe that was something I personally benefited from in my career,” Nadkarni says. “I had a lot of strong supporters and champions.”
She says she was inspired to pursue a STEM career after attending a lecture given by a female professor from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
“I remember being just so empowered and really inspired by her and thinking, Wow, there is someone who looks like me and is going places,” Nadkarni says. “When I look back, that was one of the moments that helped me shape who I am from a career standpoint.”
IEEE Senior Member Gautami Nadkarn decorated her career fair booth with a cloud motif.Gautami Nadkarn
She holds a master’s degree in management information systems from the State University of New York, Buffalo, and a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the Dwarkadas Jivanlal Sanghvi College of Engineering, in Mumbai.
Her exhibit at the career fair was on cloud computing. She decorated her booth with a cloud motif and introduced herself to the youngsters as a “superhero for big companies” because she helps them keep their information safe and organized. She used child-friendly examples, explaining to the Girl Scouts that she teaches customers how to use supercomputers to better understand information and help them determine what kind of toys children want.
“IEEE and the Girl Scouts share a view that STEM fields require a diversity of thought, experience, and backgrounds to be able to use technology to better the world.” — Craig Polk
“I think cloud computing is still an untapped area,” she says. “There are a lot of people who probably don’t know a lot about cloud engineering.
“I wanted to create an awareness and an experience to show that it’s not boring, and show how they can use it in their day-to-day lives.”
Her exhibit showcased the tasks cloud engineers handle. To describe the fundamentals of how data is stored, managed, and processed, she created a data-sorting exercise by having participants separate toy dinosaurs by color. As a way to explain the importance of data security, she made a puzzle that showed students how to protect valuable information. To demonstrate how AI can bring someone’s wild ideas to life, she taught them to use Google Cloud’s text-to-image model Imagen 3. The girls used their imaginations—which translated into AI-generated images including one of a dog riding a unicycle on a boat. The girls also made audio messages using different voices.
“The exhibitors who participate in the See Her, Be Her program provide inspiration,” Nurjahan says. “It’s inspiring to see the enthusiasm in the girls after meeting with exhibitors. Just a few minutes of engagement gives them a glimpse of their potential and sparks hope for the future, no matter what career they choose.”