You might be able to take the girl off the farm, but you can’t necessarily take the farm out of the girl, as the saying goes. That was the case for Melba Crawford, who as a teenager couldn’t wait to leave her family’s farm in Illinois to pursue an engineering career. MELBA M. CRAWFORD EMPLOYER […]
Landing a job in the video-game industry is a dream for many young engineers, but for Sushama Chakraverty, it was a happy accident. Back in 2001, she spotted a poster on her professor’s door advertising for an internship, and she applied without knowing the company she’d be working for. It turned out to be Atari, […]
If the phrase “lift as we climb” were a person, chances are good he would be John Brooks Slaughter. For decades, Slaughter has been tireless in his efforts to open doors to underrepresented minorities and women in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. Despite humble beginnings that did not suggest the direction his life […]
The IEEE Board of Directors shapes the future direction of IEEE and is committed to ensuring IEEE remains a strong and vibrant organization—serving the needs of its members and the engineering and technology community worldwide—while fulfilling the IEEE mission of advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. This article features IEEE Board of Directors members […]
Tens of thousands of tech workers have been laid off by companies recently, including at Amazon, Dropbox, GitHub, Google, Microsoft, and Vimeo. Startups, too, have made cuts, according to TechCrunch. To help IEEE members cope with losing a job, The Institute asked Chenyang Xu for advice. The IEEE Fellow is president and cochairman of Perception […]
For more than a century, utility companies have used electromechanical relays to protect power systems against damage that might occur during severe weather, accidents, and other abnormal conditions. But the relays could neither locate the faults nor accurately record what happened. Then, in 1977, Edmund O. Schweitzer III invented the digital microprocessor-based relay as part […]
Vint Cerf, recipient of the 2023 IEEE Medal of Honor, has this advice to engineers starting out their careers: “If you really want to do something big, get help, and preferably from people who are smarter than you are.” “Be humble, because unless you approach things with the understanding that you really don’t know exactly […]
Eileen Tanghal, cofounder of the venture capital firm Black Opal Ventures, didn’t set out to be a venture capitalist. The electrical engineer left her job at a semiconductor startup to pursue an MBA so she could better understand the business side of technology. During a summer break, she was chosen for an internship with a […]
Growing up, Donna Strickland had one goal in mind: Earn a Ph.D. But she didn’t know what subject she wanted to pursue until she began her undergraduate studies in physics at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ont., Canada. It was there that she got interested in studying lasers after taking a course on the subject. The […]
It was June 1973. For the past three months, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn had been working together on a problem Kahn had been pondering for some time: how to connect ground-based military computers seamlessly to communications satellites and mobile radios. The ARPANET and the way it handled communications was already well established. But extending […]