These Are 2017's Most Prominent Women Engineers In Technolog

We no longer need to emphasize the established fact that women can be as powerful as men in the tech world or even more. As they make their way up, they face atrocious sexism, but it does not stop the ones who are destined to reach the top.

This article is a tribute to the women engineers that have marvelous careers in technology that we rely our lives upon. Designers, Engineers, Bioscientists, Nuclear scientists, Rocket scientists – you name it, and they achieve it.

1. Jill Hruby

Sandia National Laboratories is a federally funded research center. When hired in 2015, the director Jill Hruby became the first woman to run one of the three nuclear weapon labs in the US. Jill has worked on things ranging from nuclear weapons to solar power. Having broken the glass ceiling in one of the most respected engineering organizations and helping out other women, she was also awarded the “Upward Mobility” award by the Society of Women Engineers in 2016.

2. Reates Curry

The technical expert in Research and Innovation at Ford, Reates Curry, holds a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering. She has used her expertise in human-machine interaction to build safer cars at Ford’s Research and Innovation Center.

Curry is also a member is Virtual Test Track Experiment (VIRTTEX) laboratory that has developed one of the most advanced driving simulators of the world. She has won Ford’s prestigious Henry Ford Technology Award twice. Moreover, she has published dozens of research papers and is also the leader in National Society of Black Engineers.

3. Regina Dugan

Facebooks’s vice president for Engineering, Regina Dugan leads the Building 8 group. Building 8 is the secretive team behind Facebook’s moonshot projects with a mission to turn R&D projects into products.

Dugan is well-known for being the first woman to lead DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. She has previously served as a member of the senior leadership at Motorolla Mobility, owned by Google. She has also led the Advanced Technology and Projects team at Google before joining Facebook.

4. Jocelyn Goldfein

The general partner at a venture capital firm Zetta Ventures, Jocelyn Goldfein is one of the best-known female engineers in the Valley. While working at Facebook, Goldfein led some of the company’s most successful mobile projects and brought machine learning algorithms to the News Feed. Working at VMware, she worked on virtualization and launched the $150 million desktop business.

Before being a venture capitalist, Goldfein backed over 20 infrastructure and artificial intelligence startups as an angel investor. Goldfein also lectures at Stanford and is also on the board of Harvey Mudd College.

5. Susie Armstrong

The senior vice president at Qualcomm, Susie Armstrong is one of the pioneer engineers of mobile internet. Working at Qualcomm for 22 years, Armstrong invented the software that deals with data on cell phones including web page access, phone apps, and photo viewers.

She has led a variety of teams at Qualcomm including mobile chipset division and software engineering. She leads the Qualcomm Thinkabit Lab and has also served as the head of worldwide customer engineering.

6. Isabel Mahe

Apple’s vice president of wireless technologies, Isabel Mahe is responsible for running a huge team of engineers that handle wireless technologies. Apple’s products are full of wireless features including WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, NFC and also a lot of its home-grown technology.

Before being poached by the CEO Steve Jobs in 2008, she served at a hot mobile company Palm and also has various patents to her name. Also, she serves as an industry advisor for UC Berkley and an advisor for the Silicon Valley’s China Wireless Technology Association.

7. Joy Dunn

SpaceX’s lead of New Product Innovation, Joy Dunn runs the task force that is responsible for bringing new products into production. She also maintains the resources for SpaceX’s rocket programs.

Having served at SpaceX since 2009, Dunn has worked on all major projects including the first commercial spacecraft in orbit, International Space Station docking, and the passenger rocket the Crew Dragon vehicle. She helps out a bunch of organizations that encourage kids to uptake science and technology.

8. Sophia Velastegui

The head of Product Architecture Roadmap at Alphabet’s Nest, Sophia Velastegui holds the responsibility of chips in Nest’s smart home appliances. Her tasks include everything from managing suppliers to device security.

Velastegui joined Nest in 2014 and has some patents to her name.

9. Myra Haggerty

The sensor software and UX prototyping vice president at Apple, Myra Haggerty is one of the most important people behind the development of most of Apple’s touch input technology including the fingerprint sensor and multi-touch controls. She has worked at Apple for 23 years having influenced everything from Mac to iPhone and holds part of several Apple patents.

10. Kate Bergeron

Kate Bergeron is the vice president of hardware engineering at Apple. She is a key person on the team responsible for developing Mac accessories like the mouse and keyboards. She joined Apple in 2002 as a senior engineer and is now part of Apple design lab called Input Design Lab, which works on the development of projects like Retina displays, rechargeable input devices, a force touch trackpad, etc.