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National Academy of Engineering Elects Two UCLA Engineering Alumnae
Earlier this year, two exceptional alumnae of the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science were elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional distinction awarded to an engineer.
Josephine Cheng BS '75, MS '77 was elected for "sustained leadership and contributions to relational database technology and its pervasive applications to a wide range of digital operational systems," and Linda P. B. Katehi MS '81, PhD '84 was honored for "contributions to three-dimensional integrated circuits and on-wafer packaging and to engineering education."
Josephine Cheng BS '75, MS '77 |
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Now Vice President of IBM's China Development Laboratories, Cheng is responsible for software development, hardware development, and lab services in the Greater China Group, which includes more than 2,000 engineers in Taipei, Shanghai and Beijing. At UCLA, she was a member of computer science professor Richard Muntz's lab.
"I fell in love with programming in my first computer science class," said Cheng. "I like that the computer is doing the work for me, I simply have to tell it what to do. And by utilizing the computer's capacity to store and synthesize information, scientists like me are able to improve the quality of our daily lives."
Well-known for creating new database technologies and products in the areas of pervasive computing and the Internet, Cheng acquired her foundation for learning and adapting to new technology in the IT industry at UCLA.
"As we have seen, the programming languages I learned 20 years ago, such as Basic and COBOL, are not popularly used programming languages today," she noted. "At UCLA, we learned not only programming language constructs, but more importantly, how to pick up any other programming language. The capacity to learn and evolve quickly is critical in today's fast moving technology era."
Cheng joined IBM in 1977, and was named the company's first female IBM Fellow in 2000. She worked with Dr. Pat Selinger to establish the first technology institute in IBM, and holds 27 patents.
As vice president at IBM, Cheng is a member of the IBM CEO Technology Team, which assesses current and future IT both inside and outside IBM. She also works with IBM's customers and universities, and gives keynotes presentations on such topics as the global technology outlook and the importance of open source. About half her time is spent running the development laboratories in Taipei, Shanghai, and Beijing.
Previously, Cheng has worked at IBM's Silicon Valley Laboratory, where she was responsible for embedded database technology and pervasive e-business in data management. During her career, she created the first release of DB2 for zOS, a relational database product, restructured DB2 to make it easier to extend and maintain, and created the first product to access DB2 data from the web.
"What I am most proud of is the work done by my Linux team in China," said Cheng. "We worked with 14 universities and a dozen primary and secondary pilot schools in China to create educational applications on an open platform with open source middleware. The intent is to deliver education at less cost to the poor western regions in China, and more than 20,000,000 students in China will benefit from our work."
Cheng, who received the Asian Engineer of the Year award in 2003, is also an active mentor and role model for women and Asians, and often speaks to K-12 students worldwide about careers in engineering and computer science.
"Women engineers are still the minority in the field, and higher ranking technical women are even more rare," explained Cheng. "Role models and encouragement are important to inspiring our young women engineers to pursue their technical careers."
Katehi was drawn to UCLA by its excellent electromagnetics program, and began her graduate studies after completing her BS in electrical engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 1977.
Linda Katehi MS '81, PhD '84 |
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"I knew I wanted to be an electrical engineer at the age of 14," Katehi said. "I was impressed by the NASA Apollo program and wanted to be like the engineers in NASA's control room. Like these engineers, I wanted to use technology to transform ideas into reality."
Katehi is now Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, where she is responsible for all academic and budgetary issues.
"On a daily basis my responsibilities are to ensure that the institution is moving forward to achieve preeminence without losing focus on its mission to serve the community, the state, and the nation. I am also trying to focus us on remembering that we exist to educate our students and make them not just successful professionals, but better people," she said. "Our challenge as a large public institution is to address our multifaceted mission and complex objectives without losing our humanity."
Despite the demands of her administrative responsibilities, Katehi maintains a small research group, which allows her to work directly with graduate students.
A member of then electrical engineering professor Nicolaos Alexopoulos' lab, her research provided the foundation for the development of a theory and algorithm for the design of microwave integrated wave circuits. "I felt very fortunate when she decided to join my group of graduate students at UCLA," noted Alexopoulos, now Dean of Engineering at UC Irvine. "Her work provided a single theory treating both circuits and antennas as radiating or scattering elements."
"UCLA prepared me to become a very successful faculty member," noted Katehi, a Fellow of IEEE. "However, what I treasure most about my time there are the interactions I had with faculty members in the electrical engineering department. They were all very dedicated to their teaching. My advisor was my mentor and has stayed one for many years."
After receiving her PhD, Katehi joined the University of Michigan in 1984 as an assistant professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science. She was quickly promoted to associate professor, then to professor. In 1998, she became the Associate Dean for Graduate Education, and then Associate Dean for Academic Affairs the following year. In 2002, Katehi joined Purdue University as the John A. Edwardson Dean of the Schools of Engineering.
"I became interested in the big issues that challenge higher education: the pursuit of institutional quality, sustaining higher education's research mission, and delivering on our institutions' obligation to contribute to improving people's quality of life," she recalled. "The ability to influence how institutions address these challenges lured me away from the traditional faculty life that I love so much."
She added, "Our biggest challenge is to reclaim the connection between engineering and society. Engineering was created as a profession to improve people's quality of life. It seems that we have lost this connection and need to reestablish it. To do this, we must consider reforming our curriculum so that we can teach students how to be inventive for the betterment of the world.
For students considering academic careers or young faculty beginning their work, Katehi stresses the importance of faculty-student interactions. "Remember that the biggest and most lasting impact faculty make is in educating students. We change their lives both by what we teach and how we work with them, how we mentor them. Be a great mentor; you can change the world that way.
Katehi and Cheng join 33 other UCLA engineering and computer science alumni as members of the National Academy of Engineering.
- Marlys Amundson
Photos courtesy Josephine Cheng, Linda Katehi
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