UCLA Engineering: UCLA Engineer Magazine

Summer Program Offers Women New Opportunities in Engineering

At a time when equality between women and men is thought to be increasing, statistics from the U.S. Department of Education show the number of girls interested in studying science and technology is actually shrinking.

One summer program geared toward giving women new opportunities at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science aims to change those numbers, and provide a model based on the outreach to other programs around the country that want to do the same.

The Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) has for the past three years hosted a program called “Women at CENS.” The program, funded by the National Science Foundation, recruits ten talented undergraduate women from across the nation to participate in an eight-week internship opportunity that allows them to conduct research with direct societal implications – in other words, environment, safety or education areas.

“In general, women tend to feel more vested in the areas of research where they feel they are making an impact,” says Karen Kim, the education director for CENS.

That need fits the CENS’ mission perfectly. Headquartered at UCLA Engineering, CENS develops wireless sensor systems and applies the revolutionary technology to critical scientific and social applications. These large-scale distributed systems, composed of sensors and actuators, can be applied to nearly every aspect engineering, from monitoring soil and atmospheric changes in an environment, to monitoring water pollution, or even monitoring building structures.

Senior Cho Mon Kyaw applied for the CENS summer program after she saw it on the National Science Foundation website. An undergraduate at UC Berkeley during the year, Kyaw is originally from Burma.

“The program here deals with real things. It’s very practical. It embodies a lot of different fields and views on research,” shared Kyaw.

The research experience is purposefully structured. Undergraduate women work closely in groups that also include men (after all, if the groups aren’t co-ed, the experiences aren’t authentic), on a variety of interconnected projects in the fields of engineering and computer science that actually benefit CENS’ long-term research.

Connecting closely with faculty and graduate student mentors, in addition to their research projects, students also attend bi-weekly meetings led by guest speakers that address topics from the downright practical – getting into graduate school, to the more intangible, like gender equity and ethics. The program also allows students to attend an immersion Tech Camp at the beginning of the summer, GRE courses, and other professional development and social activities.

The project assigned to Kyaw involved the challenge of finding new ways to network image sensors placed in the environment so that the sensors can communicate data. Kyaw helped to deploy the sensors at CENS field location at the James Reserve in the San Jacinto mountains.

“I really love my project,” says Kyaw, “and I really want to make it work. After the summer program ends, I’m going to try to continue working on it. This was such a great summer for me. It was productive as far as my research, but I learned so much about being in engineering as well.”

Says Kim, “This was really the model year for us – the third year of our three-year funded program. We were able to put into practice all of the things we’ve learned. One of the aims of the program was really to connect these researchers to CENS for the long-term, to create a lifelong connection to the center and the research, and I like to think we’ve done that for many of our students.”

As Kim and the CENS team put together their data, they hope that what they’ve learned from studying women who do choose engineering research opportunities and by creating a supportive but not isolated science environment will lead to future successes for women at other science and engineering institutions.

“Although science and engineering has made progress in opening the field to women, females still lag far behind their male counterparts, especially at the doctoral level,” explains Kim. “CENS really envisions a world where researchers, students, industry and government – both men and women equally – routinely use distributed sensor and actuator networks to understand and control both natural and artificial systems.”

Kim expects the data from the Women at CENS program to be available in the next six to twelve months.

For more information on the Women at CENS program, visit http://www.cens.ucla.edu.

- Melissa Abraham

Photos courtesy Karen Kim, CENS