More about the ladies of the club

Sept. 15, 2014
The few. The proud. The women on your engineering team. CONTROL Managing Editor Nancy Bartels interviews successful women engineers working as CEOs, entrepreneurs, team leaders and industry authors.

By Nancy Bartels, Managing Editor

The Ladies of the Club
Here’s what they have to say about their professional experiences and what they wish the men they worked with knew about them as working partners.

Work/Life Balance
If one fact becomes clear through our conversations with a dozen women engineering professionals, it’s this: Perhaps the hardest part of being in the boys’ club is balancing their work lives with their roles as wives, companions, mothers and daughters.

What Women Engineers Want
Sigmund Freud famously demanded to know what women wanted, as though it were some vast secret of the universe. For women engineers at least, the demands are neither mysterious nor complicated.

There’s No Crying in Engineering
At the top of the list of unwritten rules for women of all professions is this one: No matter what happens, you don’t cry at the office. That’s especially true if you’re one of the few women on the team.


Here Are the Engineers We Interviewed for these Stories

Janice T. Abel is director, marketing for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries for Foxboro, Invensys Process Systems. She holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Clark University, Worcester, Mass., and a master of science degree in chemical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass.

Alicia Bauer is director of global marketing, control systems and products for ABB.  She holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Ind.

Diana Bouchard, a freelance technical writer and editor, formerly with formerly of the Pulp and Paper Research Institute of Canada (Paprican), holds degrees in mathematics and computer science from McGill University, Montreal.

Kim Miller Dunn is director of sales development and support with Emerson Process Management. She will take over as the president of ISA in 2008. She has a degree in chemical engineering form California State University, Long Beach.

Tina Lockhart is director of engineering at Moore Industries. She has a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Brunel University in the U.K.

Dr. Bianca Scholten is a partner at Ordina Technical Automation, Rosmalen, Netherlands. She is the author of The Road to Integration – A Guide to Applying the ISA 95 Standard in Manufacturing. She has a degree in art history for the University of Utrecht. 
Dawn Schweitzer, a control systems engineer and engineering management specialist at Eastman Kodak, holds a degree in chemical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic University, Troy, N.Y. She also serves on the Control editorial advisory board.

Dr. Angela Summers, PE, is president of her own company, SIS-Tech. She is a specialist in industrial safety. She holds a bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering from Mississippi State University, a master of science degree in environmental engineering from Clemson University, Clemson, S.C., and a doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Ala. She is a recipient of the 2005 ISA Albert F. Sperry Award and this year was inducted into the Control Process Automation Hall of Fame.

Sandra Vann is a technology specialist at the Dow Latex Technology Center in Midland, Mich. She has a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Kathleen Waters is the principal engineer at biotech company Genentech, San Francisco. She has a master’s degree in chemical engineering. She is current the vice chairperson on the ISA S88 standards committee. In 2006, she was the first woman inducted into the Control Process Automation Hall of Fame.

Joy Weiss is president and CEO at Dust Networks. She is a past president and general manager of Nortel’s Network Management division, past president and CEO of Esker Software and of microdisplay vendor Inviso. She holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT.
  
Shari Worthington, president of Telesian Technology, holds a bachelor’s degree in biology and psychology from St. Lawrence University, Canton, N.Y., a master’s degree in psychology from Framingham State College, Framingham, Mass., and an MBA from Babson College, Babson Park, Mass. She is the co-author of e-Business in Manufacturing: Putting the Internet to Work in the Industrial Enterprise.