“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

The Northeast Microelectronics Internship Program (NMIP), an initiative of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) to connect first- and second-year college students to careers in semiconductor and microelectronics industries, recently received a $75,000 grant to expand its reach and impact. The funding is part of $9.2 million in grants awarded by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub to boost technology advancement, workforce development, education, and student engagement across the Northeast Region.

NMIP was founded by Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and director of MTL. The grant, he says, will help address a significant barrier limiting the number of students who pursue careers in critical technological fields.

“Undergraduate students are key for the future of our nation’s microelectronics workforce. They directly fill important roles that require technical fluency or move on to advanced degrees,” says Palacios. “But these students have repeatedly shared with us that the lack of internships in their first few semesters in college is the main reason why many move to industries with a more established tradition of hiring undergraduate students in their early years. This program connects students and industry partners to fix this issue.”

The NMIP funding was announced on Jan. 30 during an event featuring Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll, and Economic Development Secretary Yvonne Hao, as well as leaders from the U.S. Department of Defense and the director of Microelectronics Commons at NSTXL, the National Security Technology Accelerator. The grant to support NMIP is part of $1.5 million in new workforce development grants aimed at spurring the microelectronics and semiconductor industry across the Northeast Region. The new awards are the first investments made by the NEMC Hub, a division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, that is overseeing investments made by the federal CHIPS and Science Act following the formal establishment of the NEMC Hub in September 2023.

“We are very excited for the recognition the program is receiving. It is growing quickly and the support will help us further dive into our mission to connect talented students to the broader microelectronics ecosystem while integrating our values of curiosity, openness, excellence, respect, and community,” says Preetha Kingsview, who manages the program. “This grant will help us connect to the broader community convened by NEMC Hub in close collaboration with MassTech. We are very excited for what this support will help NMIP achieve.”

The funds provided by the NEMC Microelectronics Commons Hub will help expand the program more broadly across the Northeast, to support students and grow the pool of skilled workers for the microelectronics sector regionally. After receiving 300 applications in the first two years, the program received 296 applications in 2024 from students interested in summer internships, and is working with more than 25 industry partners across the Northeast. These NMIP students not only participate in industry-focused summer internships, but are also exposed to the broader microelectronics ecosystem through bi-weekly field trips to microelectronics companies in the region.

“The expansion of the program across the Northeast, and potentially nationwide, will extend the impact of this program to reach more students and benefit more microelectronics companies across the region,” says Christine Nolan, acting NEMC Hub program director. “Through hands-on training opportunities we are able to showcase the amazing jobs that exist in this sector and to strengthen the pipeline of talented workers to support the mission of the NEMC Hub and the national CHIPs investments.”  

Sheila Wescott says her company, MACOM, a Lowell-based developer of semiconductor devices and components, is keenly interested in sourcing intern candidates from NMIP. “We already have a success story from this program,” she says. “One of our interns completed two summer programs with us and is continuing part time in the fall — and we anticipate him joining MACOM full time after graduation.”

“NMIP is an excellent platform to engage students with a diverse background and promote microelectronics technology,” says Bin Lu, CTO and co-founder of Finwave Semiconductor.  “Finwave has benefited from engaging with the young engineers who are passionate about working with electronics and cutting-edge semiconductor technology. We are committed to continuing to work with NMIP.”

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.

The IEEE STEM Summit, a three-day virtual event in October for IEEE volunteers and educators, is expected to include a session highlighting Keysight’s lesson plans.

Educators and volunteers engaged in outreach activities with students can learn more on the Keysight TryEngineering partnership page.

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.

Developing professionals into strong leaders can have a lasting impact on a company, and the IEEE Professional Development Suite can help make it possible. The training programs in the suite help aspiring technology leaders who want to develop their essential business and management skills. Programs include IEEE Leading Technical Teams, the IEEE | Rutgers Online Mini-MBA for Engineers and Technical Professionals, and the Intensive Wireless Communications and Advanced Topics in Wireless courses offered by the IEEE Communications Society. IEEE also offers topical courses through its eLearning Library.

Tips for leading teams

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.”

For more information, see IEEE | Rutgers Online Mini-MBA for Engineers and Technical Professionals.

Training on wireless communications

The Intensive Wireless Communications and the Advanced Topics in Wireless course series are exclusively presented by the IEEE Communications Society.

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.

Learn more about the Advanced Topics in Wireless Course Series by completing this form.

Topics in the eLearning Library

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.

Sharlene Brown often accompanied her husband, IEEE Senior Member Damith Wickramanayake, to organization meetings. He has held leadership positions in the IEEE Jamaica Section, in IEEE Region 3, and on the IEEE Member and Geographic Activities board. Both are from Jamaica.

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.

Sharlene Brown

Employer

Maritime Authority of Jamaica, in Kingston

Title

Assistant accountant

Member grade

Senior member

Alma mater

University of Technology, Jamaica, in Kingston; Tsinghua University, in Beijing

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.”

This article is part of our exclusive career advice series in partnership with the IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society.

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.

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

The Northeast Microelectronics Internship Program (NMIP), an initiative of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) to connect first- and second-year college students to careers in semiconductor and microelectronics industries, recently received a $75,000 grant to expand its reach and impact. The funding is part of $9.2 million in grants awarded by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub to boost technology advancement, workforce development, education, and student engagement across the Northeast Region.

NMIP was founded by Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and director of MTL. The grant, he says, will help address a significant barrier limiting the number of students who pursue careers in critical technological fields.

“Undergraduate students are key for the future of our nation’s microelectronics workforce. They directly fill important roles that require technical fluency or move on to advanced degrees,” says Palacios. “But these students have repeatedly shared with us that the lack of internships in their first few semesters in college is the main reason why many move to industries with a more established tradition of hiring undergraduate students in their early years. This program connects students and industry partners to fix this issue.”

The NMIP funding was announced on Jan. 30 during an event featuring Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll, and Economic Development Secretary Yvonne Hao, as well as leaders from the U.S. Department of Defense and the director of Microelectronics Commons at NSTXL, the National Security Technology Accelerator. The grant to support NMIP is part of $1.5 million in new workforce development grants aimed at spurring the microelectronics and semiconductor industry across the Northeast Region. The new awards are the first investments made by the NEMC Hub, a division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, that is overseeing investments made by the federal CHIPS and Science Act following the formal establishment of the NEMC Hub in September 2023.

“We are very excited for the recognition the program is receiving. It is growing quickly and the support will help us further dive into our mission to connect talented students to the broader microelectronics ecosystem while integrating our values of curiosity, openness, excellence, respect, and community,” says Preetha Kingsview, who manages the program. “This grant will help us connect to the broader community convened by NEMC Hub in close collaboration with MassTech. We are very excited for what this support will help NMIP achieve.”

The funds provided by the NEMC Microelectronics Commons Hub will help expand the program more broadly across the Northeast, to support students and grow the pool of skilled workers for the microelectronics sector regionally. After receiving 300 applications in the first two years, the program received 296 applications in 2024 from students interested in summer internships, and is working with more than 25 industry partners across the Northeast. These NMIP students not only participate in industry-focused summer internships, but are also exposed to the broader microelectronics ecosystem through bi-weekly field trips to microelectronics companies in the region.

“The expansion of the program across the Northeast, and potentially nationwide, will extend the impact of this program to reach more students and benefit more microelectronics companies across the region,” says Christine Nolan, acting NEMC Hub program director. “Through hands-on training opportunities we are able to showcase the amazing jobs that exist in this sector and to strengthen the pipeline of talented workers to support the mission of the NEMC Hub and the national CHIPs investments.”  

Sheila Wescott says her company, MACOM, a Lowell-based developer of semiconductor devices and components, is keenly interested in sourcing intern candidates from NMIP. “We already have a success story from this program,” she says. “One of our interns completed two summer programs with us and is continuing part time in the fall — and we anticipate him joining MACOM full time after graduation.”

“NMIP is an excellent platform to engage students with a diverse background and promote microelectronics technology,” says Bin Lu, CTO and co-founder of Finwave Semiconductor.  “Finwave has benefited from engaging with the young engineers who are passionate about working with electronics and cutting-edge semiconductor technology. We are committed to continuing to work with NMIP.”

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

The Northeast Microelectronics Internship Program (NMIP), an initiative of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) to connect first- and second-year college students to careers in semiconductor and microelectronics industries, recently received a $75,000 grant to expand its reach and impact. The funding is part of $9.2 million in grants awarded by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub to boost technology advancement, workforce development, education, and student engagement across the Northeast Region.

NMIP was founded by Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and director of MTL. The grant, he says, will help address a significant barrier limiting the number of students who pursue careers in critical technological fields.

“Undergraduate students are key for the future of our nation’s microelectronics workforce. They directly fill important roles that require technical fluency or move on to advanced degrees,” says Palacios. “But these students have repeatedly shared with us that the lack of internships in their first few semesters in college is the main reason why many move to industries with a more established tradition of hiring undergraduate students in their early years. This program connects students and industry partners to fix this issue.”

The NMIP funding was announced on Jan. 30 during an event featuring Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll, and Economic Development Secretary Yvonne Hao, as well as leaders from the U.S. Department of Defense and the director of Microelectronics Commons at NSTXL, the National Security Technology Accelerator. The grant to support NMIP is part of $1.5 million in new workforce development grants aimed at spurring the microelectronics and semiconductor industry across the Northeast Region. The new awards are the first investments made by the NEMC Hub, a division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, that is overseeing investments made by the federal CHIPS and Science Act following the formal establishment of the NEMC Hub in September 2023.

“We are very excited for the recognition the program is receiving. It is growing quickly and the support will help us further dive into our mission to connect talented students to the broader microelectronics ecosystem while integrating our values of curiosity, openness, excellence, respect, and community,” says Preetha Kingsview, who manages the program. “This grant will help us connect to the broader community convened by NEMC Hub in close collaboration with MassTech. We are very excited for what this support will help NMIP achieve.”

The funds provided by the NEMC Microelectronics Commons Hub will help expand the program more broadly across the Northeast, to support students and grow the pool of skilled workers for the microelectronics sector regionally. After receiving 300 applications in the first two years, the program received 296 applications in 2024 from students interested in summer internships, and is working with more than 25 industry partners across the Northeast. These NMIP students not only participate in industry-focused summer internships, but are also exposed to the broader microelectronics ecosystem through bi-weekly field trips to microelectronics companies in the region.

“The expansion of the program across the Northeast, and potentially nationwide, will extend the impact of this program to reach more students and benefit more microelectronics companies across the region,” says Christine Nolan, acting NEMC Hub program director. “Through hands-on training opportunities we are able to showcase the amazing jobs that exist in this sector and to strengthen the pipeline of talented workers to support the mission of the NEMC Hub and the national CHIPs investments.”  

Sheila Wescott says her company, MACOM, a Lowell-based developer of semiconductor devices and components, is keenly interested in sourcing intern candidates from NMIP. “We already have a success story from this program,” she says. “One of our interns completed two summer programs with us and is continuing part time in the fall — and we anticipate him joining MACOM full time after graduation.”

“NMIP is an excellent platform to engage students with a diverse background and promote microelectronics technology,” says Bin Lu, CTO and co-founder of Finwave Semiconductor.  “Finwave has benefited from engaging with the young engineers who are passionate about working with electronics and cutting-edge semiconductor technology. We are committed to continuing to work with NMIP.”

Schoolchildren around the world are told that they have the potential to be great, often with the cheery phrase: “The sky’s the limit!”

Gladys West took those words literally.

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.

For decades, West’s contributions went unacknowledged. But she has begun receiving overdue recognition. In 2018 she was inducted into the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame. In 2021 the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences presented her its Webby Lifetime Achievement Award, while the U.K. Royal Academy of Engineering gave her the Prince Philip Medal, the organization’s highest individual honor.

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.”

Since its launch in 2019, the IEEE Learning Network (ILN) has been instrumental in advancing professional development through its diverse array of courses and programs. From specialized technical training to broader skill development, ILN online courses cater to professionals at every stage of their career and equip them with tools they need to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving landscape.

ILN is also achieving its original goal of becoming a one stop shop for education from across IEEE. Now more than 40 organizational units of IEEE have listed over 1,400 educational opportunities in ILN that provide practical knowledge from, covering artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, renewable energy, career development, and many more topics.

About 322,000 learners from more than 190 countries have completed ILN courses, with 83 percent saying in a satisfaction survey that they would recommend the program to their peers.

“The ILN is the go-to location for high-quality e-learning content to stay abreast with the latest topics in engineering and technology.” —Jason K. Hui

Many courses also allow users to earn digital certificates and badges bearing continuing-education units (CEUs) and professional development hours (PDHs). More than 65,000 digital certificates have been issued.

Testimonials from the community

“The introduction of ILN and the single platform of educational products by IEEE Educational Activities a few years ago was a hugely welcomed initiative for many in the industry and academia,” says Babak Beheshti, dean of the College of Engineering and Computing Sciences at New York Institute of Technology. “ILN provides a one-stop shop for the technical educational product search. My university engaged in a pilot to use several e-learning modules available on the ILN in several undergraduate and graduate engineering courses. The outcome was so positive that we purchased it.”

“The ILN’s centralized and comprehensive catalog has enabled me to stay updated on the latest computer hardware and software technologies,” says IEEE Fellow Sorel Reisman, professor emeritus of information systems at California State University, Fullerton. “The availability of digital certificates upon course completion and the ability to earn CEUs and PDHs is particularly valuable to technology practitioners, and reinforces IEEE’s commitment to ongoing personal and professional development for both members and nonmembers of our international community of engineers and computer scientists.”

“For me, the ILN is the go-to location for high-quality e-learning content to stay abreast with the latest topics in engineering and technology,” says Jason K. Hui, senior manager of engineering at Textron Systems in Wilmington, Mass.

Discount available now

In celebration of its five-year anniversary, during the month of July, ILN is offering US $5 off of select courses with the discount code ILN5.

You can follow ILN on Facebook and LinkedIn to engage with others, share insights, and expand your professional network.

To stay updated on courses, events, and more, sign up for ILN’s free weekly newsletter.

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

The Northeast Microelectronics Internship Program (NMIP), an initiative of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) to connect first- and second-year college students to careers in semiconductor and microelectronics industries, recently received a $75,000 grant to expand its reach and impact. The funding is part of $9.2 million in grants awarded by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub to boost technology advancement, workforce development, education, and student engagement across the Northeast Region.

NMIP was founded by Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and director of MTL. The grant, he says, will help address a significant barrier limiting the number of students who pursue careers in critical technological fields.

“Undergraduate students are key for the future of our nation’s microelectronics workforce. They directly fill important roles that require technical fluency or move on to advanced degrees,” says Palacios. “But these students have repeatedly shared with us that the lack of internships in their first few semesters in college is the main reason why many move to industries with a more established tradition of hiring undergraduate students in their early years. This program connects students and industry partners to fix this issue.”

The NMIP funding was announced on Jan. 30 during an event featuring Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll, and Economic Development Secretary Yvonne Hao, as well as leaders from the U.S. Department of Defense and the director of Microelectronics Commons at NSTXL, the National Security Technology Accelerator. The grant to support NMIP is part of $1.5 million in new workforce development grants aimed at spurring the microelectronics and semiconductor industry across the Northeast Region. The new awards are the first investments made by the NEMC Hub, a division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, that is overseeing investments made by the federal CHIPS and Science Act following the formal establishment of the NEMC Hub in September 2023.

“We are very excited for the recognition the program is receiving. It is growing quickly and the support will help us further dive into our mission to connect talented students to the broader microelectronics ecosystem while integrating our values of curiosity, openness, excellence, respect, and community,” says Preetha Kingsview, who manages the program. “This grant will help us connect to the broader community convened by NEMC Hub in close collaboration with MassTech. We are very excited for what this support will help NMIP achieve.”

The funds provided by the NEMC Microelectronics Commons Hub will help expand the program more broadly across the Northeast, to support students and grow the pool of skilled workers for the microelectronics sector regionally. After receiving 300 applications in the first two years, the program received 296 applications in 2024 from students interested in summer internships, and is working with more than 25 industry partners across the Northeast. These NMIP students not only participate in industry-focused summer internships, but are also exposed to the broader microelectronics ecosystem through bi-weekly field trips to microelectronics companies in the region.

“The expansion of the program across the Northeast, and potentially nationwide, will extend the impact of this program to reach more students and benefit more microelectronics companies across the region,” says Christine Nolan, acting NEMC Hub program director. “Through hands-on training opportunities we are able to showcase the amazing jobs that exist in this sector and to strengthen the pipeline of talented workers to support the mission of the NEMC Hub and the national CHIPs investments.”  

Sheila Wescott says her company, MACOM, a Lowell-based developer of semiconductor devices and components, is keenly interested in sourcing intern candidates from NMIP. “We already have a success story from this program,” she says. “One of our interns completed two summer programs with us and is continuing part time in the fall — and we anticipate him joining MACOM full time after graduation.”

“NMIP is an excellent platform to engage students with a diverse background and promote microelectronics technology,” says Bin Lu, CTO and co-founder of Finwave Semiconductor.  “Finwave has benefited from engaging with the young engineers who are passionate about working with electronics and cutting-edge semiconductor technology. We are committed to continuing to work with NMIP.”

When it comes to motorsports, the need for speed isn’t only on the racetrack. Engineers who support race teams also need to work at a breakneck pace to fix problems, and that’s something Aakhilesh Singhania relishes.

Singhania is a senior applications engineer at Bosch Engineering, in Novi, Mich. He develops and supports electronic control systems for hybrid race cars, which feature combustion engines and battery-powered electric motors.

Aakhilesh Singhania

Employer:

Bosch Engineering

Occupation:

Senior applications engineer

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, Manipal Institute of Technology, India; master’s degree in automotive engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

His vehicles compete in two iconic endurance races: the Rolex 24 at Daytona in Daytona Beach, Fla., and the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France. He splits his time between refining the underlying technology and providing trackside support on competition day. Given the relentless pace of the racing calendar and the intense time pressure when cars are on the track, the job is high octane. But Singhania says he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I’ve done jobs where the work gets repetitive and mundane,” he says. “Here, I’m constantly challenged. Every second counts, and you have to be very quick at making decisions.”

An Early Interest in Motorsports

Growing up in Kolkata, India, Singhania picked up a fascination with automobiles from his father, a car enthusiast.

In 2010, when Singhania began his mechanical engineering studies at India’s Manipal Institute of Technology, he got involved in the Formula Student program, an international engineering competition that challenges teams of university students to design, build, and drive a small race car. The cars typically weigh less than 250 kilograms and can have an engine no larger than 710 cubic centimeters.

“It really hooked me,” he says. “I devoted a lot of my spare time to the program, and the experience really motivated me to dive further into motorsports.”

One incident in particular shaped Singhania’s career trajectory. In 2013, he was leading Manipal’s Formula Student team and was one of the drivers for a competition in Germany. When he tried to start the vehicle, smoke poured out of the battery, and the team had to pull out of the race.

“I asked myself what I could have done differently,” he says. “It was my lack of knowledge of the electrical system of the car that was the problem.” So, he decided to get more experience and education.

Learning About Automotive Electronics

After graduating in 2014, Singhania began working on engine development for Indian car manufacturer Tata Motors in Pune. In 2016, determined to fill the gaps in his knowledge about automotive electronics, he left India to begin a master’s degree program in automotive engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

He took courses in battery management, hybrid controls, and control-system theory, parlaying this background into an internship with Bosch in 2017. After graduation in 2018, he joined Bosch full-time as a calibration engineer, developing technology for hybrid and electric vehicles.

Transitioning into motorsports required perseverance, Singhania says. He became friendly with the Bosch team that worked on electronics for race cars. Then in 2020 he got his big break.

That year, the U.S.-based International Motor Sports Association and the France-based Automobile Club de l’Ouest created standardized rules to allow the same hybrid race cars to compete in both the Sportscar Championship in North America, host of the famous Daytona race, and the global World Endurance Championship, host of Le Mans.

The Bosch motorsports team began preparing a proposal to provide the standardized hybrid system. Singhania, whose job already included creating simulations of how vehicles could be electrified, volunteered to help.

“I’m constantly challenged. Every second counts, and you have to be very quick at making decisions.”

The competition organizers selected Bosch as lead developer of the hybrid system that would be provided to all teams. Bosch engineers would also be required to test the hardware they supplied to each team to ensure none had an advantage.

“The performance of all our parts in all the cars has to fall within 1 percent of each other,” Singhania says.

After Bosch won the contract, Singhania officially became a motorsports calibration engineer, responsible for tweaking the software to fit the idiosyncrasies of each vehicle.

In 2022 he stepped up to his current role: developing software for the hybrid control unit (HCU), which is essentially the brains of the vehicle. The HCU helps coordinate all of the different subsystems such as the engine, battery, and electric motor and is responsible for balancing power requirements among these different components to maximize performance and lifetime.

Bosch’s engineers also designed software known as an equity model, which runs on the HCU. It is based on historical data collected from the operation of the hybrid systems’ various components, and controls their performance in real time to ensure all the teams’ hardware operates at the same level.

In addition, Singhania creates simulations of the race cars, which are used to better understand how the different components interact and how altering their configuration would affect performance.

Troubleshooting Problems on Race Day

Technology development is only part of Singhania’s job. On race days, he works as a support engineer, helping troubleshoot problems with the hybrid system as they crop up. Singhania and his colleagues monitor each team’s hardware using computers on Bosch’s race-day trailer, a mobile nerve center hardwired to the organizers’ control center on the race track.

“We are continuously looking at all the telemetry data coming from the hybrid system and analyzing [the system’s] health and performance,” he says.

If the Bosch engineers spot an issue or a team notifies them of a problem, they rush to the pit stall to retrieve a USB stick from the vehicle, which contains detailed data to help them diagnose and fix the issue.

After the race, the Bosch engineers analyze the telemetry data to identify ways to boost the standardized hybrid system’s performance for all the teams. In motorsports, where the difference between winning and losing can come down to fractions of a second, that kind of continual improvement is crucial.

Customers “put lots of money into this program, and they are there to win,” Singhania says.

Breaking Into Motorsports Engineering

Many engineers dream about working in the fast-paced and exciting world of motorsports, but it’s not easy breaking in. The biggest lesson Singhania learned is that if you don’t ask, you don’t get invited.

“Keep pursuing them because nobody’s going to come to you with an offer,” he says. “You have to keep talking to people and be ready when the opportunity presents itself.”

Demonstrating that you have experience contributing to challenging projects is a big help. Many of the engineers Bosch hires have been involved in Formula Student or similar automotive-engineering programs, such as the EcoCAR EV Challenge, says Singhania.

The job isn’t for everyone, though, he says. It’s demanding and requires a lot of travel and working on weekends during race season. But if you thrive under pressure and have a knack for problem solving, there are few more exciting careers.

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

The Northeast Microelectronics Internship Program (NMIP), an initiative of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) to connect first- and second-year college students to careers in semiconductor and microelectronics industries, recently received a $75,000 grant to expand its reach and impact. The funding is part of $9.2 million in grants awarded by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub to boost technology advancement, workforce development, education, and student engagement across the Northeast Region.

NMIP was founded by Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and director of MTL. The grant, he says, will help address a significant barrier limiting the number of students who pursue careers in critical technological fields.

“Undergraduate students are key for the future of our nation’s microelectronics workforce. They directly fill important roles that require technical fluency or move on to advanced degrees,” says Palacios. “But these students have repeatedly shared with us that the lack of internships in their first few semesters in college is the main reason why many move to industries with a more established tradition of hiring undergraduate students in their early years. This program connects students and industry partners to fix this issue.”

The NMIP funding was announced on Jan. 30 during an event featuring Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll, and Economic Development Secretary Yvonne Hao, as well as leaders from the U.S. Department of Defense and the director of Microelectronics Commons at NSTXL, the National Security Technology Accelerator. The grant to support NMIP is part of $1.5 million in new workforce development grants aimed at spurring the microelectronics and semiconductor industry across the Northeast Region. The new awards are the first investments made by the NEMC Hub, a division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, that is overseeing investments made by the federal CHIPS and Science Act following the formal establishment of the NEMC Hub in September 2023.

“We are very excited for the recognition the program is receiving. It is growing quickly and the support will help us further dive into our mission to connect talented students to the broader microelectronics ecosystem while integrating our values of curiosity, openness, excellence, respect, and community,” says Preetha Kingsview, who manages the program. “This grant will help us connect to the broader community convened by NEMC Hub in close collaboration with MassTech. We are very excited for what this support will help NMIP achieve.”

The funds provided by the NEMC Microelectronics Commons Hub will help expand the program more broadly across the Northeast, to support students and grow the pool of skilled workers for the microelectronics sector regionally. After receiving 300 applications in the first two years, the program received 296 applications in 2024 from students interested in summer internships, and is working with more than 25 industry partners across the Northeast. These NMIP students not only participate in industry-focused summer internships, but are also exposed to the broader microelectronics ecosystem through bi-weekly field trips to microelectronics companies in the region.

“The expansion of the program across the Northeast, and potentially nationwide, will extend the impact of this program to reach more students and benefit more microelectronics companies across the region,” says Christine Nolan, acting NEMC Hub program director. “Through hands-on training opportunities we are able to showcase the amazing jobs that exist in this sector and to strengthen the pipeline of talented workers to support the mission of the NEMC Hub and the national CHIPs investments.”  

Sheila Wescott says her company, MACOM, a Lowell-based developer of semiconductor devices and components, is keenly interested in sourcing intern candidates from NMIP. “We already have a success story from this program,” she says. “One of our interns completed two summer programs with us and is continuing part time in the fall — and we anticipate him joining MACOM full time after graduation.”

“NMIP is an excellent platform to engage students with a diverse background and promote microelectronics technology,” says Bin Lu, CTO and co-founder of Finwave Semiconductor.  “Finwave has benefited from engaging with the young engineers who are passionate about working with electronics and cutting-edge semiconductor technology. We are committed to continuing to work with NMIP.”

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

The Northeast Microelectronics Internship Program (NMIP), an initiative of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) to connect first- and second-year college students to careers in semiconductor and microelectronics industries, recently received a $75,000 grant to expand its reach and impact. The funding is part of $9.2 million in grants awarded by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub to boost technology advancement, workforce development, education, and student engagement across the Northeast Region.

NMIP was founded by Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and director of MTL. The grant, he says, will help address a significant barrier limiting the number of students who pursue careers in critical technological fields.

“Undergraduate students are key for the future of our nation’s microelectronics workforce. They directly fill important roles that require technical fluency or move on to advanced degrees,” says Palacios. “But these students have repeatedly shared with us that the lack of internships in their first few semesters in college is the main reason why many move to industries with a more established tradition of hiring undergraduate students in their early years. This program connects students and industry partners to fix this issue.”

The NMIP funding was announced on Jan. 30 during an event featuring Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll, and Economic Development Secretary Yvonne Hao, as well as leaders from the U.S. Department of Defense and the director of Microelectronics Commons at NSTXL, the National Security Technology Accelerator. The grant to support NMIP is part of $1.5 million in new workforce development grants aimed at spurring the microelectronics and semiconductor industry across the Northeast Region. The new awards are the first investments made by the NEMC Hub, a division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, that is overseeing investments made by the federal CHIPS and Science Act following the formal establishment of the NEMC Hub in September 2023.

“We are very excited for the recognition the program is receiving. It is growing quickly and the support will help us further dive into our mission to connect talented students to the broader microelectronics ecosystem while integrating our values of curiosity, openness, excellence, respect, and community,” says Preetha Kingsview, who manages the program. “This grant will help us connect to the broader community convened by NEMC Hub in close collaboration with MassTech. We are very excited for what this support will help NMIP achieve.”

The funds provided by the NEMC Microelectronics Commons Hub will help expand the program more broadly across the Northeast, to support students and grow the pool of skilled workers for the microelectronics sector regionally. After receiving 300 applications in the first two years, the program received 296 applications in 2024 from students interested in summer internships, and is working with more than 25 industry partners across the Northeast. These NMIP students not only participate in industry-focused summer internships, but are also exposed to the broader microelectronics ecosystem through bi-weekly field trips to microelectronics companies in the region.

“The expansion of the program across the Northeast, and potentially nationwide, will extend the impact of this program to reach more students and benefit more microelectronics companies across the region,” says Christine Nolan, acting NEMC Hub program director. “Through hands-on training opportunities we are able to showcase the amazing jobs that exist in this sector and to strengthen the pipeline of talented workers to support the mission of the NEMC Hub and the national CHIPs investments.”  

Sheila Wescott says her company, MACOM, a Lowell-based developer of semiconductor devices and components, is keenly interested in sourcing intern candidates from NMIP. “We already have a success story from this program,” she says. “One of our interns completed two summer programs with us and is continuing part time in the fall — and we anticipate him joining MACOM full time after graduation.”

“NMIP is an excellent platform to engage students with a diverse background and promote microelectronics technology,” says Bin Lu, CTO and co-founder of Finwave Semiconductor.  “Finwave has benefited from engaging with the young engineers who are passionate about working with electronics and cutting-edge semiconductor technology. We are committed to continuing to work with NMIP.”

By all accounts, Andrea J. Goldsmith is successful. The wireless communications pioneer is Princeton’s dean of engineering and applied sciences. She has launched two prosperous startups. She has had a long career in academia, is a science advisor to the U.S. president, and sits on the boards of several major companies. So it’s surprising to learn that she almost dropped out in her first year of the engineering program at the University of California, Berkeley.

“By the end of my first year, I really thought I didn’t belong in engineering, because I wasn’t doing well, and nobody thought I should be there,” acknowledges the IEEE Fellow. “During the summer break, I dusted myself off, cut down my hours from full time to part time at my job, and decided I wasn’t going to let anybody but me decide whether I should be an engineer or not.”

Andrea J. Goldsmith

Employer

Princeton

Title

Dean of engineering and applied sciences

Member Grade

Fellow

Alma Mater

University of California, Berkeley

Major Recognitions

2024 IEEE Mulligan Education Medal

2024 National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee

2020 Marconi Prize

2018 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award

Royal Academy of Engineering International Fellow

National Academy of Engineering Member

She kept that promise and earned a bachelor’s in engineering mathematics, then master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley. She went on to teach engineering at Stanford for more than 20 years. Her development of foundational mathematical approaches for increasing the capacity, speed, and range of wireless systems—which is what her two startups are based on—have earned her financial rewards and several recognitions including the Marconi Prize, IEEE awards for communications technology, and induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

But for all the honors Goldsmith has received, the one she says she cherishes most is the IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal. She received this year’s Mulligan award “for educating, mentoring, and inspiring generations of students, and for authoring pioneering textbooks in advanced digital communications.” The award is sponsored by MathWorks, Pearson Education, and the IEEE Life Members Fund.

“The greatest joy of being a professor is the young people who we work with—particularly my graduate students and postdocs. I believe all my success as an academic is due to them,” she says. “They are the ones who came with the ideas, and had the passion, grit, resilience, and creativity to partner with me in creating my entire research portfolio.

“Mentoring young people means mentoring all of them, not just their professional dimensions,” she says. “To be recognized in the citation that I’ve inspired, mentored, and educated generations of students fills my heart with joy.”

The importance of mentors

Growing up in Los Angeles, Goldsmith was interested in European politics and history as well as culture and languages. In her senior year of high school, she decided to withdraw to travel around Europe, and she earned a high school equivalency diploma.

Because she excelled in math and science in high school, her father—a mechanical engineering professor at UC Berkeley—suggested she consider majoring in engineering. When she returned to the states, she took her father’s advice and enrolled in UC Berkeley’s engineering program. She didn’t have all the prerequisites, so she had to take some basic math and physics courses. She also took classes in languages and philosophy.

In addition to being a full-time student, Goldsmith worked a full-time job as a waitress to pay her own way through college because, she says, “I didn’t want my dad to influence what I was going to study because he was paying for it.”

Her grades suffered from the stress of juggling school and work. In addition, being one of the few female students in the program, she says, she encountered a lot of implicit and explicit bias by her professors and classmates. Her sense of belonging also suffered, because there were no female faculty members and few women teaching assistants in the engineering program.

“I don’t believe that engineering as a profession can achieve its full potential or can solve the wicked challenges facing society with technology if we don’t have diverse people who can contribute to those solutions.”

“There was an attitude that if the women weren’t doing great then they should pick another major. Whereas if the guys weren’t doing great, that was fine,” she says. “It’s a societal message that if you don’t see women or diverse people in your program, you think ‘maybe it isn’t for me, maybe I don’t belong here.’ That’s reinforced by the implicit bias of the faculty and your peers.”

This and her poor grades led her to consider dropping out of the engineering major. But during her sophomore year, she began to turn things around. She focused on the basics courses, learned better study habits, and cut back the hours at her job.

“I realized that I could be an engineering major if that’s what I wanted. That was a big revelation,” she says. Plus, she admits, her political science classes were becoming boring compared with her engineering courses. She decided that anything she could do with a political science degree she could do with an engineering degree, but not vice versa, so she stuck with engineering.

She credits two mentors for encouraging her to stay in the program. One was Elizabeth J. Strouse, Goldsmith’s linear algebra teaching assistant and the first woman she met at the school who was pursuing a STEM career. She became Goldsmith’s role model and friend. Strouse is now a math professor at the Institut de Matheématique at the University of Bordeaux, in France.

The other was her undergraduate advisor, Aram J. Thomasian. The professor of statistics and electrical engineering advised Goldsmith to apply her mathematical knowledge to either communications or information theory.

“Thomasian absolutely pegged an area that inspired me and also had really exciting practical applications,” she says. “That goes to show how early mentors can really make a difference in steering young people in the right direction.”

After graduating in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in engineering mathematics, Goldsmith spent a few years working in industry before returning to get her graduate degrees. She began her long academic career in 1994 as an assistant professor of engineering at Caltech. She joined Stanford’s electrical engineering faculty in 1999 and left for Princeton in 2020.

Commercializing adaptive wireless communications

While at Stanford, Goldsmith conducted groundbreaking research in wireless communications. She is credited with discovering adaptive modulation techniques, which allow network designers to align the speed at which data is sent with the speed a wireless channel can support while network conditions and channel quality fluctuate. Her techniques led to a reduction of network disruptions, laid the foundation for Internet of Things applications, and enabled faster Wi-Fi speeds. She has been granted 38 U.S. patents for her work.

To commercialize her research, she helped found Quantenna Communications, in San Jose, Calif., in 2005 and served as its CTO. The startup’s technology enabled video to be distributed in the home over Wi-Fi at data rates of 600 megabits per second. The company went public in 2016 and was acquired by ON Semiconductor in 2019.

IEEE: Where Luminaries Meet

Goldsmith joined IEEE while a grad student at UC Berkeley because that was the only way she could get access to its journals, she says. Another benefit of being a member was the opportunity to network—which she discovered from attending her first conference, IEEE Globecom, in San Diego.

“It was remarkable to me that as a graduate student and a nobody, I was meeting people whose work I had read,” she says. “I was just so in awe of what they had accomplished, and they were interested in my work as well.

“It was very clear to me that being part of IEEE would allow me to interact with the luminaries in my field,” she says.

That early view of IEEE has panned out well for her career, she says. She has published more than 150 papers, which are available to read in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Goldsmith has held several leadership positions. She is a past president of the IEEE Information Theory Society and the founding editor in chief of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Information Theory.

She volunteers, she says, because “I feel I should give back to a community that has supported and helped me with my own professional aspirations.

“I feel particularly obligated to create the environment that will help the next generation as well. Investing my time as a volunteer has had such a big payoff in the impact we collectively have had on the profession.”

In 2010, she helped found another communications company, Plume Design, in Palo Alto, Calif., where she also was CTO. Plume was first to develop adaptive Wi-Fi, a technology that uses machine learning to understand how your home’s bandwidth needs change during the day and adjusts to meet them.

With both Quantenna and Plume, she could have left Stanford to become their long-term CTO, but decided not to because, she says, “I just love the research mission of universities in advancing the frontiers of knowledge and the broader service mission of universities to make the world a better place.

“My heart is so much in the university; I can’t imagine ever leaving academia.”

The importance of diversity in engineering

Goldsmith has been an active IEEE volunteer for many years. One of her most important accomplishments, she says, was launching the IEEE Board of Directors Diversity and Inclusion Committee, which she chairs.

“We put in place a lot of programs and initiatives that mattered to a lot of people and that have literally changed the face of the IEEE,” she says.

Even though several organizations and universities have recently disbanded their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, DEI is important, she says.

“As a society, we need to ensure that every person can achieve their full potential,” she says. “And as a profession, whether it’s engineering, law, medicine, or government, you need diverse ideas, perspectives, and experiences to thrive.

“My work to enhance diversity and inclusion in the engineering profession has really been about excellence,” she says. “I don’t believe that engineering as a profession can achieve its full potential or can solve the wicked challenges facing society with technology if we don’t have diverse people who can contribute to those solutions.”

She points out that she came into engineering with a diverse set of perspectives she gained from being a woman and traveling through Europe as a student.

“If we have a very narrow definition of what excellence is or what merit is, we’re going to leave out a lot of very capable, strong people who can bring different ideas, out-of-box thinking, and other dimensions of excellence to the roles,” she says. “And that hurts our overarching goals.

“When I think back to my first year of college, when DEI didn’t exist, I almost left the program,” she adds. “That would have been really sad for me, and maybe for the profession too if I wasn’t in engineering.”

Arthur Erickson discovered drones during his first year at college studying aerospace engineering. He immediately thought the sky was the limit for how the machines could be used, but it took years of hard work and some nimble decisions to turn that enthusiasm into a successful startup.

Today, Erickson is the CEO of Houston-based Hylio, a company that builds crop-spraying drones for farmers. Launched in 2015, the company has its own factory and employs more than 40 people.

Arthur Erickson

Occupation:

Aerospace engineer and founder, Hylio

Location:

Houston

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in aerospace, specializing in aeronautics, from the University of Texas at Austin

Erickson founded Hylio with classmates while they were attending the University of Texas at Austin. They were eager to quit college and launch their business, which he admits was a little presumptuous.

“We were like, ‘Screw all the school stuff—drones are the future,’” Erickson says. “I already thought I had all the requisite technical skills and had learned enough after six months of school, which obviously was arrogant.”

His parents convinced him to finish college, but Erickson and the other cofounders spent all their spare time building a multipurpose drone from off-the-shelf components and parts they made using their university’s 3D printers and laser cutters.

By the time he graduated in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace, specializing in aeronautics, the group’s prototype was complete, and they began hunting for customers. The next three years were a wild ride of testing their drones in Costa Rica and other countries across Central America.

A grocery delivery service

A promotional video about the company that Erickson posted on Instagram led to the first customer, the now-defunct Costa Rican food and grocery delivery startup GoPato. The company wanted to use the drones to make deliveries in the capital, San José, but rather than purchase the machines, GoPato offered to pay for the founders’ meals and lodging and give them a percentage of delivery fees collected.

For the next nine months, Hylio’s team spent their days sending their drones on deliveries and their nights troubleshooting problems in a makeshift workshop in their shared living room.

“We had a lot of sleepless nights,” Erickson says. “It was a trial by fire, and we learned a lot.”

One lesson was the need to build in redundant pieces of key hardware, particularly the GPS unit. “When you have a drone crash in the middle of a Costa Rican suburb, the importance of redundancy really hits home,” Erickson says.

“Drones are great for just learning, iterating, crashing things, and then rebuilding them.”

The small cut of delivery fees Hylio received wasn’t covering costs, Erickson says, so eventually the founders parted ways with GoPato. Meanwhile, they had been looking for new business opportunities in Costa Rica. They learned from local farmers that the terrain was too rugged for tractors, so most sprayed crops by hand. This was both grueling and hazardous because it brought the farmers into close proximity to the pesticides.

The Hylio team realized its drones could do this type of work faster and more safely. They designed a spray system and made some software tweaks, and by 2018 the company began offering crop-spraying services, Erickson says. The company expanded its business to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, starting with just a pair of drones but eventually operating three spraying teams of four drones each.

The work was tough, Erickson says, but the experience helped the team refine their technology, working out which sensors operated best in the alternately dusty and moist conditions found on farms. Even more important, by the end of 2019 they were finally turning a profit.

Drones are cheaper than tractors

In hindsight, agriculture was an obvious market, Erickson says, even in the United States, where spraying with herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers is typically done using large tractors. These tractors can cost up to half a million dollars to purchase and about US $7 a hectare to operate.

A pair of Hylio’s drones cost a fifth of that, Erickson says, and operating them costs about a quarter of the price. The company’s drones also fly autonomously; an operator simply marks GPS waypoints on a map to program the drone where to spray and then sits back and lets it do the job. In this way, one person can oversee multiple drones working at once, covering more fields than a single tractor could.

Arthur Erickson inspects the company’s largest spray drone, the AG-272. It can cover thousands of hectares per day.Hylio

Convincing farmers to use drones instead of tractors was tough, Erickson says. Farmers tend to be conservative and are wary of technology companies that promise too much.

“Farmers are used to people coming around every few years with some newfangled idea, like a laser that’s going to kill all their weeds or some miracle chemical,” he says.

In 2020, Hylio opened a factory in Houston and started selling drones to American farmers. The first time Hylio exhibited its machines at an agricultural trade show, Erickson says, a customer purchased one on the spot.

“It was pretty exciting,” he says. “It was a really good feeling to find out that our product was polished enough, and the pitch was attractive enough, to immediately get customers.”

Today, selling farmers on the benefits of drones is a big part of Erickson’s job. But he’s still involved in product development, and his daily meetings with the sales team have become an invaluable source of customer feedback. “They inform a lot of the features that we add to the products,” he says.

He’s currently leading development of a new type of drone—a scout—designed to quickly inspect fields for pest infestations or poor growth or to assess crop yields. But these days his job is more about managing his team of engineers than about doing hands-on engineering himself. “I’m more of a translator between the engineers and the market needs,” he says.

Focus on users’ needs

Erickson advises other founders of startups not to get too caught up in the excitement of building cutting-edge technology, because you can lose sight of what the user actually needs.

“I’ve become a big proponent of not trying to outsmart the customers,” he says. “They tell us what their pain points are and what they want to see in the product. Don’t overengineer it. Always check with the end users that what you’re building is going to be useful.”

Working with drones forces you to become a generalist, Erickson says. You need a basic understanding of structural mechanics and aerodynamics to build something airworthy. But you also need to be comfortable working with sensors, communications systems, and power electronics, not to mention the software used to control and navigate the vehicles.

Erickson advises students who want to get into the field to take courses in mechatronics, which provide a good blend of mechanical and electrical engineering. Deep knowledge of the individual parts is generally not as important as understanding how to fit all the pieces together to create a system that works well as a whole.

And if you’re a tinkerer like he is, Erickson says, there are few better ways to hone your engineering skills than building a drone. “It’s a cheap, fast way to get something up in the air,” he says. “They’re great for just learning, iterating, crashing things, and then rebuilding them.”

This article appears in the June 2024 print issue as “Careers: Arthur Erickson.”

With careers in engineering and technology evolving so rapidly, a company’s commitment to upskilling its employees is imperative to their career growth. Maintaining the appropriate credentials—such as a certificate or digital badge that attests to successful completion of a specific set of learning objectives—can lead to increased job satisfaction, employee engagement, and higher salaries.

For many engineers, completing a certain number of professional development hours and continuing-education units each year is required to maintain a professional engineering license.

Many companies have found that offering training and credentialing opportunities helps them stay competitive in today’s job marketplace. The programs encourage promotion from within—which helps reduce turnover and costly recruiting expenses for organizations. Employees with a variety of credentials are more engaged in industry-related initiatives and are more likely to take on leadership roles than their noncredentialed counterparts. Technical training programs also give employees the opportunity to enhance their technical skills and demonstrate their willingness to learn new ones.

One way to strengthen and elevate in-house technical training is through the IEEE Credentialing Program. A credential is an assurance of quality education obtained for employers and a source of pride for learners because they can share that their credentials have been verified by the world’s largest technical professional organization.

In addition to supporting engineering professionals in achieving their career goals, the certificates and digital badges available through the program help companies enhance the credibility of their training events, conferences, and courses. Also, most countries accept IEEE certificates towards their domestic continuing-education requirements for engineers.

Start earning your certificates and digital badges with these IEEE courses. Learn how your organization can offer credentials for your courses here.

This article was updated from an earlier version on 20 May.

This article appears in the June 2024 print issue.

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

The Northeast Microelectronics Internship Program (NMIP), an initiative of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) to connect first- and second-year college students to careers in semiconductor and microelectronics industries, recently received a $75,000 grant to expand its reach and impact. The funding is part of $9.2 million in grants awarded by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub to boost technology advancement, workforce development, education, and student engagement across the Northeast Region.

NMIP was founded by Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and director of MTL. The grant, he says, will help address a significant barrier limiting the number of students who pursue careers in critical technological fields.

“Undergraduate students are key for the future of our nation’s microelectronics workforce. They directly fill important roles that require technical fluency or move on to advanced degrees,” says Palacios. “But these students have repeatedly shared with us that the lack of internships in their first few semesters in college is the main reason why many move to industries with a more established tradition of hiring undergraduate students in their early years. This program connects students and industry partners to fix this issue.”

The NMIP funding was announced on Jan. 30 during an event featuring Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll, and Economic Development Secretary Yvonne Hao, as well as leaders from the U.S. Department of Defense and the director of Microelectronics Commons at NSTXL, the National Security Technology Accelerator. The grant to support NMIP is part of $1.5 million in new workforce development grants aimed at spurring the microelectronics and semiconductor industry across the Northeast Region. The new awards are the first investments made by the NEMC Hub, a division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, that is overseeing investments made by the federal CHIPS and Science Act following the formal establishment of the NEMC Hub in September 2023.

“We are very excited for the recognition the program is receiving. It is growing quickly and the support will help us further dive into our mission to connect talented students to the broader microelectronics ecosystem while integrating our values of curiosity, openness, excellence, respect, and community,” says Preetha Kingsview, who manages the program. “This grant will help us connect to the broader community convened by NEMC Hub in close collaboration with MassTech. We are very excited for what this support will help NMIP achieve.”

The funds provided by the NEMC Microelectronics Commons Hub will help expand the program more broadly across the Northeast, to support students and grow the pool of skilled workers for the microelectronics sector regionally. After receiving 300 applications in the first two years, the program received 296 applications in 2024 from students interested in summer internships, and is working with more than 25 industry partners across the Northeast. These NMIP students not only participate in industry-focused summer internships, but are also exposed to the broader microelectronics ecosystem through bi-weekly field trips to microelectronics companies in the region.

“The expansion of the program across the Northeast, and potentially nationwide, will extend the impact of this program to reach more students and benefit more microelectronics companies across the region,” says Christine Nolan, acting NEMC Hub program director. “Through hands-on training opportunities we are able to showcase the amazing jobs that exist in this sector and to strengthen the pipeline of talented workers to support the mission of the NEMC Hub and the national CHIPs investments.”  

Sheila Wescott says her company, MACOM, a Lowell-based developer of semiconductor devices and components, is keenly interested in sourcing intern candidates from NMIP. “We already have a success story from this program,” she says. “One of our interns completed two summer programs with us and is continuing part time in the fall — and we anticipate him joining MACOM full time after graduation.”

“NMIP is an excellent platform to engage students with a diverse background and promote microelectronics technology,” says Bin Lu, CTO and co-founder of Finwave Semiconductor.  “Finwave has benefited from engaging with the young engineers who are passionate about working with electronics and cutting-edge semiconductor technology. We are committed to continuing to work with NMIP.”

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

The Northeast Microelectronics Internship Program (NMIP), an initiative of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) to connect first- and second-year college students to careers in semiconductor and microelectronics industries, recently received a $75,000 grant to expand its reach and impact. The funding is part of $9.2 million in grants awarded by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub to boost technology advancement, workforce development, education, and student engagement across the Northeast Region.

NMIP was founded by Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and director of MTL. The grant, he says, will help address a significant barrier limiting the number of students who pursue careers in critical technological fields.

“Undergraduate students are key for the future of our nation’s microelectronics workforce. They directly fill important roles that require technical fluency or move on to advanced degrees,” says Palacios. “But these students have repeatedly shared with us that the lack of internships in their first few semesters in college is the main reason why many move to industries with a more established tradition of hiring undergraduate students in their early years. This program connects students and industry partners to fix this issue.”

The NMIP funding was announced on Jan. 30 during an event featuring Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll, and Economic Development Secretary Yvonne Hao, as well as leaders from the U.S. Department of Defense and the director of Microelectronics Commons at NSTXL, the National Security Technology Accelerator. The grant to support NMIP is part of $1.5 million in new workforce development grants aimed at spurring the microelectronics and semiconductor industry across the Northeast Region. The new awards are the first investments made by the NEMC Hub, a division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, that is overseeing investments made by the federal CHIPS and Science Act following the formal establishment of the NEMC Hub in September 2023.

“We are very excited for the recognition the program is receiving. It is growing quickly and the support will help us further dive into our mission to connect talented students to the broader microelectronics ecosystem while integrating our values of curiosity, openness, excellence, respect, and community,” says Preetha Kingsview, who manages the program. “This grant will help us connect to the broader community convened by NEMC Hub in close collaboration with MassTech. We are very excited for what this support will help NMIP achieve.”

The funds provided by the NEMC Microelectronics Commons Hub will help expand the program more broadly across the Northeast, to support students and grow the pool of skilled workers for the microelectronics sector regionally. After receiving 300 applications in the first two years, the program received 296 applications in 2024 from students interested in summer internships, and is working with more than 25 industry partners across the Northeast. These NMIP students not only participate in industry-focused summer internships, but are also exposed to the broader microelectronics ecosystem through bi-weekly field trips to microelectronics companies in the region.

“The expansion of the program across the Northeast, and potentially nationwide, will extend the impact of this program to reach more students and benefit more microelectronics companies across the region,” says Christine Nolan, acting NEMC Hub program director. “Through hands-on training opportunities we are able to showcase the amazing jobs that exist in this sector and to strengthen the pipeline of talented workers to support the mission of the NEMC Hub and the national CHIPs investments.”  

Sheila Wescott says her company, MACOM, a Lowell-based developer of semiconductor devices and components, is keenly interested in sourcing intern candidates from NMIP. “We already have a success story from this program,” she says. “One of our interns completed two summer programs with us and is continuing part time in the fall — and we anticipate him joining MACOM full time after graduation.”

“NMIP is an excellent platform to engage students with a diverse background and promote microelectronics technology,” says Bin Lu, CTO and co-founder of Finwave Semiconductor.  “Finwave has benefited from engaging with the young engineers who are passionate about working with electronics and cutting-edge semiconductor technology. We are committed to continuing to work with NMIP.”

This article is part of our exclusive career advice series in partnership with the IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society.

As you begin your professional career freshly armed with an engineering degree, your initial roles and responsibilities are likely to revolve around the knowledge and competencies you learned at school. If you do well in your job, you’re apt to be promoted, gaining more responsibilities such as managing projects, interacting with other departments, making presentations to management, and meeting with customers. You probably also will gain a general understanding of how your company and the business world work.

At some point in your career, you’re likely to be asked an important question: Are you interested in a management role?

There is no right or wrong answer. Engineers have fulfilling, rewarding careers as individual contributors and as managers—and companies need both. You should decide your path based on your interests and ambitions as well as your strengths and shortcomings.

However, the specific considerations involved aren’t always obvious. To help you, this article covers some of the differences between the two career paths, as well as factors that might influence you.

The remarks are based on our personal experiences in corporate careers spanning decades in the managerial track and the technical track. Tariq worked at Honeywell; Gus at 3M. We have included advice from IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society colleagues.

Opting for either track isn’t a career-long commitment. Many engineers who go into management return to the technical track, in some cases of their own volition. And management opportunities can be adopted late in one’s career, again based on individual preferences or organizational needs.

In either case, there tends to be a cost to switching tracks. While the decision of which track to take certainly isn’t irrevocable, it behooves engineers to understand the pros and cons involved.

Differences between the two tracks

Broadly, the managerial track is similar across all companies. It starts with supervising small groups, extends through middle-management layers, progresses up to leadership positions and, ultimately, the executive suite. Management backgrounds can vary, however. For example, although initial management levels in a technology organization generally require an engineering or science degree, some top leaders in a company might be more familiar with sales, marketing, or finance.

It’s a different story for climbing the technical ladder. Beyond the first engineering-level positions, there is no standard model. In some cases individual contributors hit the career ceiling below the management levels. In others, formal roles exist that are equivalent to junior management positions in terms of pay scale and other aspects.

“Engineers have fulfilling, rewarding careers as individual contributors and as managers—and companies need both.”

Some organizations have a well-defined promotional system with multiple salary bands for technical staff, parallel to those for management positions. Senior technologists often have a title such as Fellow, staff scientist, or architect, with top-of-the-ladder positions including corporate Fellow, chief engineer/scientist, and enterprise architect.

Organizational structures vary considerably among small companies—including startups, medium companies, and large corporations. Small businesses often don’t have formal or extensive technical tracks, but their lack of structure can make it easier to advance in responsibilities and qualifications while staying deeply technical.

In more established companies, structures and processes tend to be well defined and set by policy.

For those interested in the technical track, the robustness of a company’s technical ladder can be a factor in joining the company. Conversely, if you’re interested in the technical ladder and you’re working for a company that does not offer one, that might be a reason to look for opportunities elsewhere.

Understanding the career paths a company offers is especially important for technologists.

The requirements for success

First and foremost, the track you lean toward should align with aspirations for your career—and your personal life.

As you advance in the management path, you can drive business and organizational success through decisions you make and influence. You also will be expected to shape and nurture employees in your organization by providing feedback and guidance. You likely will have more control over resources—people as well as funding—and more opportunity for defining and executing strategy.

The technical path has much going for it as well, especially if you are passionate about solving technical challenges and increasing your expertise in your area of specialization. You won’t be supervising large numbers of employees, but you will manage significant projects and programs that give you chances to propose and define such initiatives. You also likely will have more control of your time and not have to deal with the stress involved with being responsible for the performance of the people and groups reporting to you.

The requirements for success in the two tracks offer contrasts as well. Technical expertise is an entry requirement for the technical track. It’s not just technical depth, however. As you advance, technical breadth is likely to become increasingly important and will need to be supplemented by an understanding of the business, including markets, customers, economics, and government regulations.

Pure technical expertise will never be the sole performance criterion. Soft skills such as verbal and written communication, getting along with people, time management, and teamwork are crucial for managers and leaders.

On the financial side, salaries and growth prospects generally will be higher on the managerial track. Executive tiers can include substantial bonuses and stock options. Salary growth is typically slower for senior technologists.

Managerial and technical paths are not always mutually exclusive. It is, in fact, not uncommon for staff members who are on the technical ladder to supervise small teams. And some senior managers are able to maintain their technical expertise and earn recognition for it.

We recommend you take time to consider which of the two tracks is more attractive—before you get asked to choose. If you’re early in your career, you don’t need to make this important decision now. You can keep your options open and discuss them with your peers, senior colleagues, and management. And you can contemplate and clarify what your objectives and preferences are. When the question does come up, you’ll be better prepared to answer it.

Making breakthroughs in artificial intelligence these days requires huge amounts of computing power. In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that by the end of this year, the company will have installed 350,000 Nvidia GPUs—the specialized computer chips used to train AI models—to power its AI research.

As a data-center network engineer with Meta’s network infrastructure team, Susana Contrera is playing a leading role in this unprecedented technology rollout. Her job is about “bringing designs to life,” she says. Contrera and her colleagues take high-level plans for the company’s AI infrastructure and turn those blueprints into reality by working out how to wire, power, cool, and house the GPUs in the company’s data centers.

Susana Contrera

Employer:

Meta

Occupation:

Data-center network engineer

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in telecommunications engineering, Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas, Venezuela

Contrera, who now works remotely from Florida, has been at Meta since 2013, spending most of that time helping to build the computer systems that support its social media networks, including Facebook and Instagram. But she says that AI infrastructure has become a growing priority, particularly in the past two years, and represents an entirely new challenge. Not only is Meta building some of the world’s first AI supercomputers, it is racing against other companies like Google and OpenAI to be the first to make breakthroughs.

“We are sitting right at the forefront of the technology,” Contrera says. “It’s super challenging, but it’s also super interesting, because you see all these people pushing the boundaries of what we thought we could do.”

Cisco Certification Opened Doors

Growing up in Caracas, Venezuela, Contrera says her first introduction to technology came from playing video games with her older brother. But she decided to pursue a career in engineering because of her parents, who were small-business owners.

“They were always telling me how technology was going to be a game changer in the future, and how a career in engineering could open many doors,” she says.

She enrolled at Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas in 2001 to study telecommunications engineering. In her final year, she signed up for the training and certification program to become a Cisco Certified Network Associate. The program covered topics such as the fundamentals of networking and security, IP services, and automation and programmability.

The certificate opened the door to her first job in 2006—managing the computer network of a business-process outsourcing company, Atento, in Caracas.

“Getting your hands dirty can give you a lot of perspective.”

“It was a very large enterprise network that had just the right amount of complexity for a very small team,” she says. “That gave me a lot of freedom to put my knowledge into practice.”

At the time, Venezuela was going through a period of political unrest. Contrera says she didn’t see a future for herself in the country, so she decided to leave for Europe.

She enrolled in a master’s degree program in project management in 2009 at Spain’s Pontifical University of Salamanca, continuing to collect additional certifications through Cisco in her free time. In 2010, partway through the program, she left for a job as a support engineer at the Madrid-based law firm Ecija, which provides legal advice to technology, media, and telecommunications companies. Following that with a stint as a network engineer at Amazon’s facility in Dublin from 2011 to 2013, she then joined Meta and “the rest is history,” she says.

Starting From the Edge Network

Contrera first joined Meta as a network deployment engineer, helping build the company’s “edge” network. In this type of network design, user requests go out to small edge servers dotted around the world instead of to Meta’s main data centers. Edge systems can deal with requests faster and reduce the load on the company’s main computers.

After several years traveling around Europe setting up this infrastructure, she took a managerial position in 2016. But after a couple of years she decided to return to a hands-on role at the company.

“I missed the satisfaction that you get when you’re part of a project, and you can clearly see the impact of solving a complex technical problem,” she says.

Because of the rapid growth of Meta’s services, her work primarily involved scaling up the capacity of its data centers as quickly as possible and boosting the efficiency with which data flowed through the network. But the work she is doing today to build out Meta’s AI infrastructure presents very different challenges, she says.

Designing Data Centers for AI

Training Meta’s largest AI models involves coordinating computation over large numbers of GPUs split into clusters. These clusters are often housed in different facilities, often in distant cities. It’s crucial that messages passing back and forth have very low latency and are lossless—in other words, they move fast and don’t drop any information.

Building data centers that can meet these requirements first involves Meta’s network engineering team deciding what kind of hardware should be used and how it needs to be connected.

“They have to think about how those clusters look from a logical perspective,” Contrera says.

Then Contrera and other members of the network infrastructure team take this plan and figure out how to fit it into Meta’s existing data centers. They consider how much space the hardware needs, how much power and cooling it will require, and how to adapt the communications systems to support the additional data traffic it will generate. Crucially, this AI hardware sits in the same facilities as the rest of Meta’s computing hardware, so the engineers have to make sure it doesn’t take resources away from other important services.

“We help translate these ideas into the real world,” Contrera says. “And we have to make sure they fit not only today, but they also make sense for the long-term plans of how we are scaling our infrastructure.”

Working on a Transformative Technology

Planning for the future is particularly challenging when it comes to AI, Contrera says, because the field is moving so quickly.

“It’s not like there is a road map of how AI is going to look in the next five years,” she says. “So we sometimes have to adapt quickly to changes.”

With today’s heated competition among companies to be the first to make AI advances, there is a lot of pressure to get the AI computing infrastructure up and running. This makes the work much more demanding, she says, but it’s also energizing to see the entire company rallying around this goal.

While she sometimes gets lost in the day-to-day of the job, she loves working on a potentially transformative technology. “It’s pretty exciting to see the possibilities and to know that we are a tiny piece of that big puzzle,” she says.

Hands-on Data Center Experience

For those interested in becoming a network engineer, Contrera says the certification programs run by companies like Cisco are useful. But she says it’s also important not to focus just on simply ticking boxes or rushing through courses just to earn credentials. “Take your time to understand the topics because that’s where the value is,” she says.

It’s good to get some experience working in data centers on infrastructure deployment, she says, because “getting your hands dirty can give you a lot of perspective.” And increasingly, coding can be another useful skill to develop to complement more traditional network engineering capabilities.

Mainly, she says, just “enjoy the ride” because networking can be a truly fascinating topic once you delve in. “There’s this orchestra of protocols and different technologies playing together and interacting,” she says. “I think that’s beautiful.”

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

The Northeast Microelectronics Internship Program (NMIP), an initiative of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) to connect first- and second-year college students to careers in semiconductor and microelectronics industries, recently received a $75,000 grant to expand its reach and impact. The funding is part of $9.2 million in grants awarded by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub to boost technology advancement, workforce development, education, and student engagement across the Northeast Region.

NMIP was founded by Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and director of MTL. The grant, he says, will help address a significant barrier limiting the number of students who pursue careers in critical technological fields.

“Undergraduate students are key for the future of our nation’s microelectronics workforce. They directly fill important roles that require technical fluency or move on to advanced degrees,” says Palacios. “But these students have repeatedly shared with us that the lack of internships in their first few semesters in college is the main reason why many move to industries with a more established tradition of hiring undergraduate students in their early years. This program connects students and industry partners to fix this issue.”

The NMIP funding was announced on Jan. 30 during an event featuring Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll, and Economic Development Secretary Yvonne Hao, as well as leaders from the U.S. Department of Defense and the director of Microelectronics Commons at NSTXL, the National Security Technology Accelerator. The grant to support NMIP is part of $1.5 million in new workforce development grants aimed at spurring the microelectronics and semiconductor industry across the Northeast Region. The new awards are the first investments made by the NEMC Hub, a division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, that is overseeing investments made by the federal CHIPS and Science Act following the formal establishment of the NEMC Hub in September 2023.

“We are very excited for the recognition the program is receiving. It is growing quickly and the support will help us further dive into our mission to connect talented students to the broader microelectronics ecosystem while integrating our values of curiosity, openness, excellence, respect, and community,” says Preetha Kingsview, who manages the program. “This grant will help us connect to the broader community convened by NEMC Hub in close collaboration with MassTech. We are very excited for what this support will help NMIP achieve.”

The funds provided by the NEMC Microelectronics Commons Hub will help expand the program more broadly across the Northeast, to support students and grow the pool of skilled workers for the microelectronics sector regionally. After receiving 300 applications in the first two years, the program received 296 applications in 2024 from students interested in summer internships, and is working with more than 25 industry partners across the Northeast. These NMIP students not only participate in industry-focused summer internships, but are also exposed to the broader microelectronics ecosystem through bi-weekly field trips to microelectronics companies in the region.

“The expansion of the program across the Northeast, and potentially nationwide, will extend the impact of this program to reach more students and benefit more microelectronics companies across the region,” says Christine Nolan, acting NEMC Hub program director. “Through hands-on training opportunities we are able to showcase the amazing jobs that exist in this sector and to strengthen the pipeline of talented workers to support the mission of the NEMC Hub and the national CHIPs investments.”  

Sheila Wescott says her company, MACOM, a Lowell-based developer of semiconductor devices and components, is keenly interested in sourcing intern candidates from NMIP. “We already have a success story from this program,” she says. “One of our interns completed two summer programs with us and is continuing part time in the fall — and we anticipate him joining MACOM full time after graduation.”

“NMIP is an excellent platform to engage students with a diverse background and promote microelectronics technology,” says Bin Lu, CTO and co-founder of Finwave Semiconductor.  “Finwave has benefited from engaging with the young engineers who are passionate about working with electronics and cutting-edge semiconductor technology. We are committed to continuing to work with NMIP.”

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

The Northeast Microelectronics Internship Program (NMIP), an initiative of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) to connect first- and second-year college students to careers in semiconductor and microelectronics industries, recently received a $75,000 grant to expand its reach and impact. The funding is part of $9.2 million in grants awarded by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub to boost technology advancement, workforce development, education, and student engagement across the Northeast Region.

NMIP was founded by Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and director of MTL. The grant, he says, will help address a significant barrier limiting the number of students who pursue careers in critical technological fields.

“Undergraduate students are key for the future of our nation’s microelectronics workforce. They directly fill important roles that require technical fluency or move on to advanced degrees,” says Palacios. “But these students have repeatedly shared with us that the lack of internships in their first few semesters in college is the main reason why many move to industries with a more established tradition of hiring undergraduate students in their early years. This program connects students and industry partners to fix this issue.”

The NMIP funding was announced on Jan. 30 during an event featuring Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll, and Economic Development Secretary Yvonne Hao, as well as leaders from the U.S. Department of Defense and the director of Microelectronics Commons at NSTXL, the National Security Technology Accelerator. The grant to support NMIP is part of $1.5 million in new workforce development grants aimed at spurring the microelectronics and semiconductor industry across the Northeast Region. The new awards are the first investments made by the NEMC Hub, a division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, that is overseeing investments made by the federal CHIPS and Science Act following the formal establishment of the NEMC Hub in September 2023.

“We are very excited for the recognition the program is receiving. It is growing quickly and the support will help us further dive into our mission to connect talented students to the broader microelectronics ecosystem while integrating our values of curiosity, openness, excellence, respect, and community,” says Preetha Kingsview, who manages the program. “This grant will help us connect to the broader community convened by NEMC Hub in close collaboration with MassTech. We are very excited for what this support will help NMIP achieve.”

The funds provided by the NEMC Microelectronics Commons Hub will help expand the program more broadly across the Northeast, to support students and grow the pool of skilled workers for the microelectronics sector regionally. After receiving 300 applications in the first two years, the program received 296 applications in 2024 from students interested in summer internships, and is working with more than 25 industry partners across the Northeast. These NMIP students not only participate in industry-focused summer internships, but are also exposed to the broader microelectronics ecosystem through bi-weekly field trips to microelectronics companies in the region.

“The expansion of the program across the Northeast, and potentially nationwide, will extend the impact of this program to reach more students and benefit more microelectronics companies across the region,” says Christine Nolan, acting NEMC Hub program director. “Through hands-on training opportunities we are able to showcase the amazing jobs that exist in this sector and to strengthen the pipeline of talented workers to support the mission of the NEMC Hub and the national CHIPs investments.”  

Sheila Wescott says her company, MACOM, a Lowell-based developer of semiconductor devices and components, is keenly interested in sourcing intern candidates from NMIP. “We already have a success story from this program,” she says. “One of our interns completed two summer programs with us and is continuing part time in the fall — and we anticipate him joining MACOM full time after graduation.”

“NMIP is an excellent platform to engage students with a diverse background and promote microelectronics technology,” says Bin Lu, CTO and co-founder of Finwave Semiconductor.  “Finwave has benefited from engaging with the young engineers who are passionate about working with electronics and cutting-edge semiconductor technology. We are committed to continuing to work with NMIP.”

AI hiring has been growing at least slightly in most regions around the world, with Hong Kong leading the pack; however, AI careers are losing ground compared with the overall job market, according to the 2024 AI Index Report. This annual effort by Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) draws from a host of data to understand the state of the AI industry today.

Stanford’s AI Index looks at the performance of AI models, investment, research, and regulations. But tucked within the 385 pages of the 2024 Index are several insights into AI career trends, based on data from LinkedIn and Lightcast, a labor market analytics firm.

Here’s a quick look at that analysis, in four charts.

Overall hiring is up—a little

But don’t get too excited—as a share of overall labor demand, AI jobs are slipping

Python is still the best skill to have

Machine learning loses luster

No matter where professionals are in their tech career—whether just starting out or well established—it’s never a bad time for them to reassess their skills to ensure they are aligned with market needs.

As the professional home for engineers and technical professionals, IEEE offers a wealth of career-development resources. To showcase them, from 14 to 20 April the organization is holding its annual Education Week. The event highlights the array of educational opportunities, webinars, online courses, activities, and scholarships provided by IEEE’s organizational units, societies, and councils around the globe.

Individuals can participate in IEEE Education Week by exploring dozens of live and virtual events. Here are a few highlights:

• IEEE: Educating for the Future. Tom Coughlin, IEEE’s president and CEO, kicks off the week on 15 April with a keynote presentation at noon EDT. Coughlin’s priorities include retaining younger members, engaging industry, developing workforce programs, and focusing on the future of education.
• Investing in Your Future: The Importance of Continuing Education for Engineers. At 11 a.m. on 18 April, learn about the IEEE Professional Development Suite of specialized business and leadership training programs.
• Essential Business Skills for Engineers: Bridging the Gap Between Business and Engineering. Join IEEE and representatives from the Rutgers Business School to learn how engineers and technical professionals can grow their career through management training. This event—to be held at 10 a.m. on 16 April Singapore Standard Time and 10 p.m EDT on 17 April—is primarily for engineering professionals in the Asia Pacific region. Attendees will be introduced to the IEEE | Rutgers Online Mini-MBA Program for Engineers program.
• Add Value and Attendees to Your Events With IEEE Credentialing. Learn about the benefits of IEEE digital certificates and badges at noon EDT on 17 April. The session covers how to find events that offer professional development hours and continuing education units.
• IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu 2024 TechX. The honor society’s three-day virtual event, 17 to 19 April, addresses opportunities and challenges presented by new technology, along with Q&A sessions with experts. TechX includes a virtual job fair and networking events.
• What You Should Know About the IEEE Learning Network. At noon EDT on 16 April, learn how the platform can help you advance your career with eLearning courses on that cover emerging technologies.
• Best Practices for Service Learning From Past EPICS in IEEE Project Leaders. Leah Jamieson, the 2007 IEEE president, is set to lead a panel discussion on the IEEE Engineering Projects in Community Service program at 9:30 a.m. on 16 April. Jamieson, who helped found EPICS at Purdue University, and other project leaders will share their experiences.
• TryEngineering and Keysight: Inspiring the Engineers of Tomorrow. IEEE and Keysight Technologies, a manufacturer of electronics test and measurement equipment and software, recently partnered to develop lesson plans on electronics and the power of simulations. Learn more about the program at 10:30 a.m. on 17 April.
• Global Semiconductors: IEEE Resources and Communities for Those Working in the Semiconductor Industry. This session, at 1 p.m. on 18 April, can explain which IEEE groups offer educational materials for semiconductor engineers.

Offers and discounts

The Education Week website lists special offers and discounts. The IEEE Learning Network, for example, is offering some of its most popular courses for US $10 each. They cover artificial intelligence standards, configuration management, the Internet of Things, smart cities, and more. You can use the code ILNIEW24 until 30 April.

Be sure to complete the IEEE Education Week quiz by noon EDT on 20 April for a chance to earn an IEEE Education Week 2024 digital badge, which can be displayed on social media.

To learn more about IEEE Education Week, watch this video or follow the event on Facebook or X.

As educators, it’s important that we showcase the wide range of career opportunities available in the field of computing, not only to inspire learners, but also to help them feel sure they’re choosing to study a subject that is useful for their future. For example, a survey from the BBC in September 2023 found that more than a quarter of UK teenagers often feel anxious, with “exams and school life” among the main causes. To help young people chart their career paths, we recently hosted two live webinars for National Careers Week in the UK.

Our goal for the webinars was to highlight the breadth of careers within computing and to provide insights from professionals who are pursuing their own diverse and rewarding paths. Each webinar featured engaging discussions and an interactive Q&A session with learners who use our Ada Computer Science platform. The learners could ask their own questions to get firsthand knowledge and perspectives from our guest speakers.

Our guest speakers

Jess Van Brummelen is a Human–Computer Interaction Research Scientist at Niantic, the video games company behind augmented reality game Pokémon Go. After developing an interest in programming during her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, she went on to complete a Master’s degree and PhD in computer science at MIT.

Ashley Edwards is a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, working on reinforcement learning. She received her PhD in 2019 from Georgia Tech, spent time as an intern at Google Brain, and worked as a research scientist at Uber AI Labs.

You can read extracts from our interviews with Jess and Ashley and watch the full videos below. Teachers have contacted us to say they’ll be using the webinars for careers-focused sessions with their students. We hope you will do the same!

Please note that we have edited the extracts below to add clarity.

Jess Van Brummelen

Hi Jess. What advice would you give to a student who is thinking about a career in human–computer interaction in the gaming industry?

In terms of HCI and gaming, I’d actually recommend that you keep gaming! It’s a small part of my job but it’s really important to understand what’s fun and enjoyable in games. Not only that; gaming can be great for learning to problem-solve — there’s been all sorts of research on the positive impact of gaming.

A second thing, going back to how I felt in my mechanical engineering classes, I really felt like an ‘other’ and not someone who is the standard computer scientist or engineer. I would encourage students to pursue their dreams anyway because it’s so important to have diversity in these types of careers, especially technology, because it goes out to so many different people and it can really affect society. It’s really important that the people who make it come from many different backgrounds and cultures so we can create technology that is better for everyone.

[From Owen, a student on the livestream] What’s the most impossible idea you’ve come up with while working at Niantic?

I’m currently publishing a paper addressing the question, ‘Can we guide people without using anything visual on their phone?’ That means using audio and haptic (technology that transmits information via touch, e.g. vibrations) prompts instead. We tried out different commands where the phone said ‘turn left’ and ‘turn right’, but we really wanted to test how to guide someone more specifically in a game environment. For example, if there was a hidden object on a wall in a game that a person couldn’t see, could we guide them to that object while they’re walking? So I ran a study where I guided people to scan a statue by moving around it. Scanning is the process of using the camera on your phone to scan an object in real life, which is then reconstructed on your phone. Scanning objects can trigger other augmented reality experiences within a game. For example, you might scan a real-life box in a room and this might trigger an animation of that box opening to reveal a secret within the game. We tested a lot of different things. For example, test subjects listened to music as they were walking and when they were on the right path, the music sounded really good. But when they were off the path, it sounded terrible. So it helped them to look for the right path. Then if you were pointing the phone in the wrong direction for scanning objects, you would get warning vibrations on the phone. So we did the study and we were hoping it would improve safety. It turns out it was neutral on improving safety — I think this is because it was such a novel system. People weren’t used to using it and still bumped into things! But it did make people better at scanning the objects, which was interesting.

Watch Jess’s full interview:

Ashley Edwards

Hi Ashley. Is there something you studied in school that you found to be more useful now than you ever thought it would be?

Maths! I always enjoyed doing maths, but I didn’t realise I would need it as a computer scientist. You see it popping up all the time, especially in machine learning. Having a strong knowledge of calculus and linear algebra is really helpful.

How do you train an AI model using machine learning? 

You start by asking the question, ‘What is the problem I’m trying to solve?’ Then typically you need input data and the outputs you want to achieve, so you ask two more questions, ‘What data do I want to come in?’ and ‘What do I want to come out?’ Let’s say you decide to use a supervised learning model (a category of machine learning where labelled data sets are used to train algorithms to detect patterns and predict outcomes) to predict whether a photo contains a cat. You train the model using a giant set of images with labels that say either ‘This is a cat’ or ‘This isn’t a cat’. By training the model with the images, you get to a point where your model can analyse the features of any image and predict whether it contains a cat or not.

In my field of research, I work on something called reinforcement learning, which is where you train your model through trial and error and the use of ‘rewards’. Let’s imagine we are trying to train a robot. We might write a program that tells the robot, ‘I am going to give you a reward if you take the right step forward and it’s going to be a positive reward. If you fall over, I’m going to give you a negative reward.’ So you train the robot to prioritise the right behaviours to optimise the rewards it’s getting.

[From a student] Will I still need to learn to code in the future?

I think it is going to be very different in the future, but we’ll still need to learn how to build different types of algorithms and we’re going to need to understand the concepts behind coding as well. We’ll still need to ask questions like, ‘What is it that I want to build?’ and ‘Is this actually doing the correct thing?’

Watch Ashley’s full interview:

Broadening access

Jess and Ashley are forging successful careers not only through a combination of smart choices, hard work, talent, and a passion for technology; they also had access to opportunities to discover their passion and receive an education in this field. Too many young people around the world still don’t have these opportunities.

That is why we provide free resources and training to help schools broaden access to computing education. For example, our free learning platform, Ada Computer Science, provides students aged 14 to 19 with high-quality computing resources and interactive questions, written by experts from our team. To learn more, visit adacomputerscience.org.

The post Careers in computer science: Two perspectives appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Working in an ice cream factory is a dream for anyone who enjoys the frozen dessert. For control systems engineer Patryk Borkowski, a job at the biggest ice cream company in the world is also a great way to put his automation expertise to use.

Patryk Borkowski

Employer:

Unilever, Colworth Science Park, in Sharnbrook, England

Occupation:

Control systems engineer

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in automation and robotics from the West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin, Poland

Borkowski works at the Advanced Prototype and Engineering Centre of the multinational consumer goods company Unilever. Unilever’s corporate umbrella covers such ice cream brands as Ben & Jerry’s, Breyers, Good Humor, Magnum, and Walls.

Borkowski maintains and updates equipment at the innovation center’s pilot plant at Colworth Science Park in Sharnbrook, England. The company’s food scientists and engineers use this small-scale factory to experiment with new ice cream formulations and novel production methods.

The reality of the job might not exactly live up to an ice cream lover’s dream. For safety reasons, eating the product in the plant is prohibited.

“You can’t just put your mouth underneath the nozzle of an ice cream machine and fill your belly,” he says.

For an engineer, though, the complex chemistry and processing required to create ice cream products make for fascinating problem-solving. Much of Borkowski’s work involves improving the environmental impact of ice cream production by cutting waste and reducing the amount of energy needed to keep products frozen.

And he loves working on a product that puts a smile on the faces of customers. “Ice cream is a deeply indulgent and happy product,” he says. “We love working to deliver a superior taste and a superior way to experience ice cream.”

Ice Cream Innovation

Borkowski joined Unilever as a control systems engineer in 2021. While he’s not allowed to discuss many of the details of his research, he says one of the projects he has worked on is a modular manufacturing line that the company uses to develop new kinds of ice cream. The setup allows pieces of equipment such as sauce baths, nitrogen baths for quickly freezing layers, and chocolate deposition systems to be seamlessly switched in and out so that food scientists can experiment and create new products.

Ice cream is a fascinating product to work on for an engineer, Borkowski says, because it’s inherently unstable. “Ice cream doesn’t want to be frozen; it pretty much wants to be melted on the floor,” he says. “We’re trying to bend the chemistry to bind all the ingredients into a semistable mixture that gives you that great taste and feeling on the tongue.”

Making Production More Sustainable

Helping design new products is just one part of Borkowski’s job. Unilever is targeting sustainability across the company, so cutting waste and improving energy efficiency are key. He recently helped develop a testing rig to simulate freezer doors being repeatedly opened and closed in shops. This helped collect temperature data that was used to design new freezers that run at higher temperatures to save electricity.

In 2022, he was temporarily transferred to one of Unilever’s ice cream factories in Hellendoorn, Netherlands, to uncover inefficiencies in the production process. He built a system that collected and collated operational data from all the factory’s machines to identify the causes of stoppages and waste.

“There’s a deep pride in knowing the machines that we’ve programmed make something that people buy and enjoy.”

It wasn’t easy. Some of the machines were older and no longer supported by their manufacturers. Also, they ran legacy code written in Dutch—a language Borkowski doesn’t speak.

Borkowski ended up reverse-engineering the machines to figure out their operating systems, then reprogrammed them to communicate with the new data-collection system. Now the data-collection system can be easily adapted to work at any Unilever factory.

Discovering a Love for Technology

As a child growing up in Stargard, Poland, Borkowski says there was little to indicate that he would become an engineer. At school, he loved writing, drawing, and learning new languages. He imagined himself having a career in the creative industries.

But in the late 1990s, his parents got a second-hand computer and a modem. He quickly discovered online communities for technology enthusiasts and began learning about programming.

Because of his growing fascination with technology, at 16, Borkowski opted to attend a technical high school, pursuing a technical diploma in electronics and learning about components, soldering, and assembly language. In 2011, he enrolled at the West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin, Poland, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in automation and robotics.

When he graduated in 2015, there were few opportunities in Poland to put his skills to use, so he moved to London. There, Borkowski initially worked odd jobs in warehouses and production facilities. After a brief stint as an electronic technician assembling ultrasonic scanners, he joined bakery company Brioche Pasquier in Milton Keynes, England, as an automation engineer.

This was an exciting move, Borkowski says, because he was finally doing control engineering, the discipline he’d always wanted to pursue. Part of his duties involved daily maintenance, but he also joined a team building new production lines from the ground up, linking together machinery such as mixers, industrial ovens, coolers, and packaging units. They programmed the machines so they all worked together seamlessly without human intervention.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, new projects went on hold and work slowed down, Borkowski says. There seemed to be little opportunity to advance his career at Brioche Pasquier, so he applied for the control systems job at Unilever.

“When I was briefed on the work, they told me it was all R&D and every project was different,” he says. “I thought that sounded like a challenge.”

The Importance of a Theoretical Foundation

Control engineers require a broad palette of skills in both electronics and programming, Borkowski says. Some of these can be learned on the job, he says, but a degree in subjects like automation or robotics provides an important theoretical foundation.

The biggest piece of advice he has for fledgling control engineers is to stay calm, which he admits can be difficult when a manager is pressuring you to quickly get a line back up to avoid production delays.

“Sometimes it’s better to step away and give yourself a few minutes to think before you do anything,” he says. Rushing can often result in mistakes that cause more problems in the long run.

While working in production can sometimes be stressful, “There’s a deep pride in knowing the machines that we’ve programmed make something that people buy and enjoy,” Borkowski says.

Kingsley Fregene wants to keep people out of harm’s way—so much so that he has ordered his life around that fundamental goal. As director of technology integration at Lockheed Martin, in Grand Prairie, Texas, he leads a team that is actively pursuing breakthroughs designed to, among other things, allow life-saving missions to be performed in hazardous environments without putting humans at risk.

Fregene, an IEEE Fellow, has supervised the development of algorithms for autonomous aircraft used for military missions and disaster-recovery operations. He also contributed to algorithms enabling autonomous undersea vehicles to inspect offshore oil and gas platforms after hurricanes so that divers don’t have to.

Kingsley Fregene

Employer

Lockheed Martin in Grand Prairie, Texas

Title

Director of technology integration and intellectual property

Member grade

Fellow

Alma maters

Federal University of Technology in Owerri, Nigeria; University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada

One of his recent projects was helping to design the world’s first autonomous unmanned aircraft system in which the entire vehicle—not just its rotors—spins. The micro air vehicle was inspired by the aerodynamics of maple seeds, whose twirling slows and prolongs their descent.

The benefits of unmanned aerial vehicles

In a major project more than a decade ago, Fregene and colleagues at Lockheed Martin teamed up with Kaman Aerospace of Bloomfield, Conn., on an unmanned version of its K-Max helicopter. The K-Max can ferry as much as 2,700 kilograms of cargo in a single trip. The Lockheed team created and implemented mission systems and control algorithms that augmented the control system already on the helicopter, enabling it to fly completely autonomously.

The U.S. Marine Corps used the autonomous K-Max helicopters for resupply missions in Afghanistan. It’s been estimated that those delivery flights made hundreds of ground-based convoy missions unnecessary, thereby sparing thousands of troops from being exposed to improvised explosive devices, land mines, and snipers.

The autonomous version of the K-Max also has been demonstrated in disaster-recovery operations. It offers the possibility of keeping humanitarian aid workers away from dangerous situations, as well as rescuing people trapped in disaster zones.

“It is often better to fly in lifesaving supplies instead of loading trucks with supplies to bring them along roads that might not be passable anymore,” Fregene says.

K-Max and one of Lockheed Martin’s small UAVs, the Indago, have been used to fight fires. Indago flies above structures engulfed in flames and maps out the hot zones, on which K-Max then drops flame retardant or water.

“This collaborative mission between two of our platforms means no firefighters are put in harm’s way,” Fregene says.

He and his team also helped in the development of the maple seed–inspired Samarai, the first autonomous wholly rotating unmanned aircraft system. The 41-centimeter-long drone weighs a mere 227 grams. It depends on an algorithm that tells an actuator when and how much to adjust the angle of a flap that determines its direction.

Compared with other aircraft, the spinning drone is simpler to produce, requires less maintenance, and is less complex to control because its only control surface is the trailing-edge flap.

IEEE Fellow Kingsley Fregene holds up the maple seed–inspired Samarai, the first autonomous wholly rotating unmanned aircraft system.Kingsley Fregene

Saving lives in Nigeria

Fregene’s aim to keep people safe started with his first after-school job, as a bus conductor, when he was in the sixth grade. As part of the job, in Oghara, Nigeria, then a small fishing village along the Niger River, he collected fares and directed passengers on and off the bus.

With no traffic cops or traffic lights, there often was chaos at major intersections. People would get injured, and he occasionally would get out and direct traffic.

“I, a little guy, stood out there with a bright orange shirt and started directing traffic,” he says. “It’s amazing that people paid attention and listened to me.”

Many youngsters are inspired to pursue engineering by fiddling with gadgets. Not Fregene.

“The circumstances of my childhood did not provide opportunities to get my hands on devices to tinker with,” he says. “What we had were a lot of opportunities to observe nature.”

The presence of oil and gas installations in his village, which is in the oil-producing part of Nigeria, led him to wonder how they worked and how they were remotely controlled. They didn’t remain mysterious for long.

While attending the Federal University of Technology in Owerri, Nigeria, he interned at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp., which was installing those remote operating systems, calibrating them, and validating their operation.

After graduating first in his class in 1996 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering, he went on to graduate school at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada, where he researched autonomy and automatic control systems. While earning master’s and doctoral degrees, both in electrical and computer engineering, he found time to help those more needy than he was.

He joined a team of student volunteers who organized drop-in homework clubs and provided mentoring to at-risk grade school students in the community. The activity won him the university’s President’s Circle Award in 2001.

Thinking back on that time, Fregene recalls his interaction with one girl whose life he helped turn around.

“She was dragged kicking and screaming most of the time to complete these sessions,” Fregene recalls. “But she started believing in herself and what she could do. And everything changed. She ended up getting accepted to the University of Waterloo and became part of the UW tutor team I was leading.”

Fregene says his commitment to the tutoring and mentoring program came from having once been in need of academic assistance himself. Although he had excellent grades in history and language arts, he did poorly in mathematics and science. Things turned around for him in the ninth grade when a new teacher had a particular way of teaching math that “turned the light bulb on in my brain,” he says. “My grades took off right after he showed up.”

After completing his doctorate in 2002, he began working as an R&D engineer at a Honeywell Aerospace facility in Minneapolis. During six years there, he worked on the development of unmanned aerial vehicles including a drone that was used in remote sensing of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive hazards. The drone became the world’s first aerial robot used for nuclear disaster recovery when it flew inside the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in the aftermath of a 2011 tsunami that struck Japan and knocked out the plant’s power and cooling, causing meltdowns in three reactor cores.

At Honeywell he also worked on microelectromechanical systems, which are used in gyroscopes and inertial measurement units. Both MEMS tools, which are used to measure the angular motion of a body, can be found in cellphones. Fregene also worked on a control system to make corrections to the imperfections that diminished the MEMS sensors’ accuracy.

He left the company in 2008 to become lead engineer and scientist at the Lockheed Martin research facility in Cherry Hill, N.J.

IEEE membership has its benefits

Fregene became acquainted with IEEE as an undergrad by reading journals such as the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and the IEEE Control Systems magazine, for which he has served as guest editor.

He joined IEEE in grad school, and that decision has been paying dividends ever since, he says.

The connections he made through the organization helped him land internships at leading laboratories, starting him on his career path. After meeting researchers at conferences or reading their papers in IEEE publications, he would send them notes introducing himself and indicating his interest in visiting the researcher’s lab and working there during the summer. The practice led to internships at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, and at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee.

The IEEE connections helped him get his first job. While working on his master’s degree, he presented a paper at the 1999 IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control.

“After my presentation,” he says, “somebody from Honeywell came over and said, ‘That was a great presentation. By the way, these are the types of things we do at Honeywell. I think it would be a great place for you when you’re ready to start working.’”

Fregene remains active in IEEE. He’s on the editorial board of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, and recently completed two terms as chair of the IEEE technical committee on aerospace controls.

IEEE “is the type of global organization that provides a forum for stellar researchers to communicate the work they are doing to colleagues,” he says, “and for setting standards that define real-life systems that are changing the world every day.”