Meet The World’s Most Influential Women Engineers

Dr. Barbara Liskov, Institute Professor of Engineering at MIT, has been ranked first in a new release identifying the most influential women engineers in the world. The list comes from Academic Influence, the academic rankings system that uses artificial intelligence to search massive databases and measure the impact of work by individuals in various fields.

Relying on machine-learning technology developed with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Academic Influence searches open-source data in two sources - Wikipedia and CrossRef - for papers, chapters, books, and citations to individuals worldwide.

Collectively, these databases contain billions of continuously updated data points about millions of individuals’ achievements. But the method yields more than just a popularity contest of the individuals who gain the most public mentions. It focuses on the intersection of name mentions and discipline mentions so that individuals are credited with “hits” only when their names also intersect with mentions of the professional fields in which they excel. When cumulated, these intersectional mentions constitute a person’s influence score. (More details about the ranking methodology can be found here.)

On June 23, in celebration of International Women in Engineering Day 2021, an annual recognition organized by the Women’s Engineering Society, Academic Influence announced its compilation of the 35 women making the greatest impact in engineering. Here’s some basic information about them.

The top 10 women on the list, in order, were:

Barbara Liskov, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Diane Greene, American entrepreneur

Jennifer Widom, Stanford University

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Barbara Oakley, Oakland University

Mae C. Jemison, physician, former astronaut and the first Black woman to travel into space

Adah Almutairi, University of California, San Diego

Manuela M. Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University

Daniela L. Rus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Of the 35, almost three-quarters (26) of the women were employed in America, either in academic institutions, businesses or as entrepreneurs. Among universities, MIT led the list with four of the women holding position there (Dina Katabi, Barbara Liskov, Dava Newman, and Daniela Rus).

Two of the women - Barbara Oakley and Jennifer Widom - have been pioneers in the development of Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, the breakthrough in online education that’s given millions of students affordable access to a wide range of higher education content.

The influencers represent the full array of engineering sub-disciplines, including computer science, mechanical engineering, materials science, electrical engineering, chemical engineering and biomedical specialties.

Several have been CEOs of major technology companies, such as Ursula Burns the former CEO of Xerox; Anousheh Ansari, who currently heads up Prodea Systems, prior to being the co-founder and CEO of Telecom Technologies; Diane Greene, who,was CEO of Google Cloud as well as the founder of multiple tech companies; and Lisa Su, President and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices.

They include winners of highly prestigious prizes such as Cal Tech’s Frances Arnold (Nobel Prize in chemistry), Barbara Liskov (Turing Award), and Dina Katabi (named a MacArthur Fellow and recipient of the ACM Prize in Computing). Many have been elected to membership in the most elite national academies such as the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

A number of the influencers have led academic institutions, directed prominent nonprofit organizations or headed up federal agencies. For example, Gilda Barabino is the president of the Olin College of Engineering, where she is also a professor of biomedical and chemical engineering. Elizabeth Cannon is the former president of the University of Calgary.

Wanda Austin was CEO of The Aerospace Corporation. Arati Prabhakar headed two major government agencies - DARPA, the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Nominated by President Barack Obama, Dava Newman served as Deputy Administrator of NASA.

While many of those on the list have helped blaze the trail for women to enter and flourish in engineering and other STEM fields, one in particular deserves special mention for her work in this area. It’s Dawn Bonfield, of Aston University in Birmingham, England. Bonfield is the founder and director of Towards Vision, a company that works for greater diversity and inclusion in engineering. She is also past president of the Women's Engineering Society.

Commenting on the new list, Jed Macosko, President of Academic Influence and professor of physics at Wake Forest University, said, "Engineering has a reputation as a mostly male profession. We want to set the record straight and let more people know that women engineers are not only growing in number but also are driving the field forward in new and creative ways. They bring innovative thinking and bold solutions that make their profession better, and more people need to know who they are and see why they are the vanguard of a new era in engineering."