Posted June 2022

International Women in Engineering Day, observed on June 23, is a celebration of the achievements of women who are changing the world and making waves in engineering. To honor their achievements, here are some of the many women from the BU community pushing the engineering world forward.

Xin Zhang

Xin Zhang is well-known for her pioneering work with metamaterials in areas as diverse as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and noise-canceling acoustics. A College of Engineering professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, she is the director of BU’s Laboratory for Microsystems Technology. In 2008, Xin Zhang was named as BU’s Innovator of the Year, becoming the ninth faculty member and the first woman to win the award. More recently, she was awarded the 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship after building a helmet that could improve the accessibility and quality of MRI machines and synthetic structures that could drastically reduce noise pollution.

Joyce Wong

After losing her grandfather to cancer and watching her father suffer a nonfatal heart attack while pursuing her Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Joyce Wong realized that her research in biomaterials and cellular interactions could make a significant medical impact. A quarter of a century later, Wong’s biomaterial innovations have been recognized by the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), which has elected her a fellow. Her research promises to make a powerful difference in the treatment of several medical conditions, including pediatric heart ailments, cancer, and women’s reproductive health.

Wynter Duncanson (ENG’09)

During one of her first college tours as a high school junior, Wynter Duncanson saw engineering students working on a therapeutic device that helped improve the quality of life of a mobility-impaired child. From that moment, she was hooked. Now a BU College of Engineering assistant dean of outreach and diversity and a biomedical engineering lecturer, Duncanson has worked to improve the accessibility of STEM fields. In 2019, her efforts were recognized when she was awarded the IAspire Leadership Academy fellowship.

Ksenia Bravaya

Ksenia Bravaya spends her days gazing within the tiny building blocks of life that many of us take for granted every day: atoms, proteins, and subatomic particles. Bravaya, a BU College of Arts & Sciences professor of chemistry, and her team use computer simulations to map the movement and transfer of electrons. Her work has allowed for a deeper understanding of the underlying principles that govern electrons, for which she was named a 2020 Sloan Research fellow.

Emily Ryan

BU Engineering assistant professor of mechanical engineering Emily Ryan is working in her Computational Energy Laboratory using computational models to improve the capacity, usability, and safety of the next generation of lithium batteries. Her research could be vital in suppressing the growth of dendrites, a leading cause of capacity loss and short-circuit-related fires. Her modeling of a porous material that could suppress dendrite growth could one day help increase the efficiency of electric cars or better regulate the collection and distribution of renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

Gayatri Sundar Rajan (ENG’22)

Safe drinking water is taken for granted in many areas but 300 million to 500 million people worldwide have no access to safe water, with approximately 2 billion people having inadequate access. This global water problem inspired a team of BU ENG students led by Gayatri Sundar Rajan to try to create a water harvester that would pull moisture from the air to provide potable water without great effort or expense.

Lizy Flagg (ENG’20)

After COVID-19 sent her back to her parents’ home to complete her biomedical engineering degree, Flagg found herself with more free time. She worried about how the pandemic would worsen the existing economic disparities in Boston and searched for a safe, hands-on way to support the communities most affected by the crisis. After volunteering with a local nonprofit dedicated to combatting food waste and food insecurity in the greater Boston area, Lizy found that the task of contacting donors and recipients was cumbersome and inefficient. In an effort to increase the number of meals provided to her community, Lizy built an app to streamline the process and increase the nonprofit’s efficiency for volunteers.

Jill Albertelli (ENG’91)

From a young age, Jill Albertelli liked to solve problems. She remembers enjoying science and math, and at home, she’d do things like take apart the vacuum cleaner. “You name it—if it was mechanical, I took it apart at some point,” she says. “But I always put it back together.” Now, as vice president of Quality at Pratt & Whitney, a jet engine manufacturer, Albertelli is constantly reengineering practices and processes to improve their business. She not only wants to create a better product, but also wants to be part of the change that creates better ways of working—by bringing more gender diversity to engineering.

Sarah Davies

In science, career progress is typically determined by certain criteria, such as how often a researcher’s studies are cited by other scientists and by the number of papers they publish in prestigious, high-impact scientific journals. Those metrics, however, are biased against already marginalized groups in science and ensure that sexism and racism continue to plague the field. Sarah Davies, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of biology, worked with 23 other researchers to pen a PLOS Biology piece aimed at promoting inclusive metrics of success in science-related fields to disrupt and dismantle a system that hinders the efforts and ignores the achievements of marginalized researchers.