Gone are the days when people used to have a view that the tech wizardry is not elected by women as their career. Girls and women were systematically tracked away from science and math throughout their educations, limiting their training and options to go into these fields as adults. Not just that, but for some, women were not even meant for the science stream. But, the world now is witnessing changes and indeed this change in perception is because of the fact that many Indian women today are pioneering across a gamut of industries by leveraging the best of their prowess in global technologies. In the current era, India as a nation is widely recognized for producing the highest number of female graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Though, women candidates constitute merely 14 percent of the total 280,000 scientists, engineers, and technologists in research development institutions in India, according to the United Nations. It is expected that the graph will rise and touch an appropriate number in the coming years. The scenario is possible only because of the trailblazing women leaders in STEM, who decided to go beyond the norm and etch their name in the industry as well as in history. There is a lot more to learn from observing such leaders - their dedication, skills, will power, positive nature and much more. Let us meet five such women leaders who used their intelligence and revolutionary thinking to touch communities all around.
Dr. Aditi Sen De
In May 2019, the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology was awarded to 33 winners of past three years on the occasion of National Science Day in Delhi. This is one of India's most coveted prizes in science. Out of the 33 winners, one thing stood out - there was just one woman. Dr. Aditi Sen De of Harish Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad. Dr. Aditi was the only woman among the 33 scientists who were awarded for the year 2016, 2017 and 2018. In the history of this prestigious prize, 519 men and just 16 women were awarded. When Dr. Aditi achieved the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, it was more than a personal achievement for her. It was her way to show how to get past the leaky pipeline for a female scientist who had to choose between her career and her family. A professor of physics, Dr. Aditi is a dedicated maestro who just needs a computer and high-speed internet to work. But her research has the potential to revolutionize banking, cryptography and change the face of computing as we have known it for the past four decades. So basically, Dr. Aditi works on quantum computation, a challenging and vastly-promising field that has the potential to speed up computational processes exponentially and break encrypted data. She aims to build such a technology that will be able to protect itself from the upcoming threats in the banking sector. Her revolutionary mission when successful will definitely revolutionize the internet banking, online transaction and digital data space globally.
Dr. Manjula Reddy
Dr. Manjula is a Chief Scientist at the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad. She is well known for the discoveries that have changed the arc of microbiology. Through elegant genetic and biochemical analyses, Dr. Manjula and her colleagues have revealed critical steps of cell wall growth that are not only fundamental for understanding bacterial biology but also have important implications for developing new classes of antibiotics. Her work could potentially help in creating a new class of antibiotics to combat antibiotic-resistant microbes. She was awarded the Infosys Prize 2019 in Life Sciences for her groundbreaking discoveries concerning the structure of cell walls in bacteria. While offering the award, Infosys even praised Dr. Manjula in a release stating that “Despite over 100 years of research into bacteria, how a single cell achieves this rapid body-remodelling is not fully understood. Dr. Reddy’s work has provided critical new insights”. Dr. Manjula won the $100,000 Infosys Prize in 2019, in the Life Sciences category. Dr. Manjula believes that the obsession with ‘relevance’ can grow tiresome. She compares scientific research to any artistic enterprise and believes the increase in the knowledge base is an application in itself. According to her, it is relevant because it is important to understand nature’s secrets, to know how organisms function.
Dr. Nimmi Ramanujam
Dr. Nimmi is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. She is an Indian-American and renowned for her research on cervical and breast cancer to establish innovative and low-priced technology-based solutions for millions of suffering and disenfranchised women around the world. Dr. Nimmi directs the centre for Global Women’s Health Technologies (GWHT), a social partnership between the Pratt School of Engineering and Duke Global Health Institute, and uses this platform and authority to push her trainees at Duke to become agents of change and truly understand the humanity that guides medicine. Dr. Nimmi has a mission to develop technology to have a wide-reaching impact on women’s health. Her research focuses on designing innovations that enable complex services to be accessible at the primary care level for cancer prevention. Her research also helps with the development of tools that will make cancer treatment more effective and efficient. In 2018, Dr. Nimmi completed the invention of a low-cost diagnostic tool for the painless detection of cervical cancer in women, aptly called the Pocket Colposcope. Also, AIIMS New Delhi successfully completed the trials of the tool. The tool costs just $500 against the $15,000 machine. And the most important part, it is not painful like other tests. Dr. Nimmi continued currently collaborating with the Tamil Nadu government in order to integrate the FDA-approved tool into primary care facilities. For her work, Dr. Nimmi was recognized with the Social Impact Abie Award in the year 2019. The Social Impact Abie Award recognizes a woman whose work is making a positive impact on women, technology, and society. Dr. Nimmi truly justifies the award.
Komal Singh
Komal is a tech expert by day and a storyteller mom by night. She is an individual who loves to code and bake cupcakes at the same time. She is not just an expert in data crunching and program planning but she also loves daydreaming, along with pottery making. She has been working in technology for over a decade and is currently an Engineering Program Manager at Google. Being a software engineer, mother, and immigrant, Komal is especially conscious of how technological systems can undo social barriers and public health crises, but only if they are consistently inclusive. It was a question from her daughter – “Mom, why are all engineers boys?” that made her realized that something is not correct and has to be rectified. Realizing the power and necessity of a narrative about female figures in STEM, Komal then decided to write Ara the Star Engineer into existence, a vivid picture book that follows mini-mathematician Ara and her sidekick droid named DeeDee on an adventure of computing, technology, and algorithms. Ara’s character, though partially inspired by Komal’s daughter, was designed as culturally-neutral as possible in order for her story to be universal. On her quest to count all the stars in the sky, Ara encounters a number of culturally-diverse female tech-experts with quirky titles like ‘Code Commander’ and ‘Intrepid Innovator’, all of whom were inspired by Komal’s real-life coworkers. Aimed for children aged 5 to 9, with illustrations by Ipek Konak, Ara the Star Engineer was released on October 11th in celebration of the International Day of the Girl Child. Through Ara, Komal aims to create a symbol of hope for girls that can justify that anyone can do anything, and it’s not just about boys, girls can equally become engineers, doctors, and alike. Komal’s dedication towards bringing a revolution in the topic of gender parity is what needed in the current era.
Sunita Sarawagi
Sunita, a professor of computer science at IIT Bombay, is one of the six winners of Infosys Prizes in 2019, along with Dr. Manjula Reddy. She won the award in the category of Engineering & Computer Science. Sunita works on extracting structured information from unstructured data which have a profound practical impact. According to the jury, Sunita was one of the earliest researchers to develop information extraction techniques that went beyond the world of structured databases to the kind of unstructured data one finds on the World Wide Web. This necessitated the use of novel machine learning techniques for the extraction of information from natural language text. A self-proclaimed ‘100% nerd’, Sunita is constantly trying to strike a balance between high-quality globally-appealing research and India-related problems. One such problem with real-life implications was ‘address cleaning’. Sunita developed the formalism of semi-Markov conditional random fields for the task of segmenting out sequences of words which might correspond to ‘named entities’ such as company names or job titles which extended in practical applications such as the development of software for cleaning and structuring Indian addresses, as well as de-duplicating them.
The above mentioned leaders are a few of the handpicked personalities who are renowned for their great works. But, there are many who are dedicated just like these five individuals and are contributing their best utilizing their knowledge in STEM to create a better world around us. We hope that through this article, the youth of India will get some inspiration, which can definitely bring some changes in the society, in the coming years.
