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Abstract: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a good woman in possession of a good resume must be in want of a leadership position. However little known the feelings or views of such a woman may be on her first entering the workplace, this truth is so well fixed in her mind that in her pride she might be oblivious to the existing prejudice, or lack of sense or sensibility in her future environment. While Jane Austen certainly did not write her masterpieces thinking about women in science and engineering, there is a great deal that has not changed about the perception of women in a technical environment with respect to the challenges that women faced over 200 years ago in “the polite society”. In this talk, Prof. Bassiri-Gharb will discuss some of these challenges she has faced through her career in both industry and academia, as well as offer personal and peer-reviewed advice on how to overcome them.

Speaker Bio:

Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb is the Harris Saunders Chair and a Professor in the G. W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her BSMS summa cum laude from University of Padua, Italy in 2001 in Materials Engineering, and her PhD from Penn State University, USA in 2005 in Materials Science and Engineering. Following her doctoral work, she was a senior research R&D engineer at QUALCOMM MEMS Research and Innovation Center in Silicon Valley, prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2007. Since September 2022, she has served as a (rotator) Program Director at National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences’ Division of Materials Research, overseeing the Ceramics Program. She is currently the President of the IEEE Council on Radio Frequency Identification, and served as the President of the IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control Society, in 2018-2019. She is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and ELATES (Executive Leadership in Academic Technology, Engineering and Science). Prof. Bassiri-Gharb’s research interests are in functional materials and most prominently ferroelectric, antiferroelectric, piezoelectric and electro-chemo-mechanically active materials for applications to sensors, actuators and transducers; and machine learning approaches for interpretation of the physical phenomena at the nanoscale, as probed by scanning probe microscopy based techniques. She has published over 70 peer reviewed manuscripts and presented over 50 plenary, keynote and invited talks on these topics.