Women in Engineering Day Breakfast
About the day!
Thursday 23rd July marked International Women in Engineering Day (INWED) for 2022. This year’s theme was around innovators and inventors, a fundamental part of engineering. In celebration of INWED, Women in Engineering hosted a breakfast and speaker event for high school students, teachers, industry professionals and current University of Auckland students.
We opened the day with a karakia, followed by a range of delicious savouries, muffins, juice, tea and coffee. We were then treated to three engaging speakers- Dr. Jesin James, Lysea Haggie, and Dr. Emily Tosio.
Lysea opened up the speaker session, remarking about her pathway to the present. She studied a BE(Hons) and BSci Conjoint here, at the University of Auckland and is now working towards her PhD, researching computational neuroscience techniques to model how our brain works! Lysea was particularly interesting, telling us about her Bachelor of Science in Exercise Science- a passion of hers as she was highly involved in sports. She really pushed home how engineering at Auckland allows you to foster all of your passions; you don’t have to give up one for the other.
Jesin spoke of her journey through engineering, landing her in research surrounding speech signal processing and synthesis- this is the sort of thing behind our text-to-speech, and voice assistants like Siri! She made some really interesting points around her voice assistants like Siri are often responsive to American accents more so than Kiwi accents, as well as masculine voices are often recognised more easily than feminine voices. Jesin highlighted the importance of diversity in engineering to make speech-related devices more responsive to all.
Next, we were treated to Emily Tosio, a design control specialist at Aroa Biosurgery. Emily completed her study at Auckland, going on to gain a PhD, researching how cartilage and bone change in early osteoarthritis. Emily showed us how engineering can help people around us. She recounted how growing up she wanted to be a doctor so that she could help people- but blood wasn’t quite for her! She instead found this same passion for engineering, where she could help just as many- if not more- people. She even showed us one of her projects- part of a sheep that has special properties that makes it perfect for wound dressing!
Overall, we heard from three inspiring speakers that each had their own journey, and their own motivation to get into engineering. They are inventors and innovators in their own right, and continue to pave the path for women in engineering to not simply solve problems, but to invent solutions to better the world for everyone. This INWED, we celebrate them, we celebrate the trailblazers before us, and we celebrate the learners of tomorrow. WiE can truly build a better world!
