Karen has played a pivotal role in Celestia’s ambitious project to deliver an innovative electronic scanning antenna using new generation architectures, a challenge that stretches every aspect of her technical skill, 22 years’ electronics engineering experience and academic study.

Karen delivered a stand-out year in 2023:

• Added definition to the prototype antenna system architecture

• Detailed supporting documentation and customer presentations in formats required

• Prepared for and held various test readiness reviews

• Laid groundwork for tests demonstrating prototype performance at Dundee Satellite in a frequency new to the station

• Working to partner protocols and financial constraints

• Factory acceptance test groundwork

• Preparation for 2024/5 commercialisation

Dr. Giorgia Longobardi, currently serves as CEO of Cambridge GaN Devices (CGD) a spinout from Cambridge University which she co-founded. 

Dr Longobardi heads an experienced team of committed people working with enthusiasm and continuous drive to do things better. She never forgets why she founded CGD: to change how energy is used and protect the environment with efficient power electronics. Her view is that it takes courage to innovate differently. “Creating an environment where innovation can be fostered, therefore, is a very specific leadership challenge. One must have well-constructed core values upon which to build the company, but then to embrace divergence so that different thinking and innovation can flourish. Courage, Innovation and sustainability are joined by Knowledge and Responsibility are the five core pillars that Dr Giorgia Longobardi established, upon which CGD operates.

Rituparna (Ritu) Mandal is the general manager at MediaTek Bangalore with over 750 employees. Ritu’s career began at Texas Instruments (TI) in 1997, where she spent 15 years overseeing foundation IP development and platform development. In 2013, Ritu founded Immensa Semiconductors, a fabless semiconductor company specializing in digital IP design. Two and a half years later, Immensa was acquired by MediaTek.

Ritu is passionate about fostering diversity and empowering others. She regularly holds innovation workshops for MediaTek team members of all levels to discuss personal and professional goals. Plus, over the last 4 years, Ritu spearheaded the MediaTek Bangalore Technical Conference, a two-day conference where more than 100 MediaTek employees presented their innovations and exchanged ideas on the work they were doing.

Accomplished embedded software engineer and senior technical lead Manjula Balasubramanian started her career as an application developer for industry leader General Electric in India, later becoming a Team Lead and trainer at Easun Reyrolle. She put her thriving career on hold to support her family’s move to Paris. Eager to restart work a year later, nothing was forthcoming in the French job market, notoriously challenging, even for highly skilled candidates.

Manjula courageously persevered for nearly a decade through career uncertainty that would have defeated less determined talent. That she rapidly emerged as an asset to her new employer, Versinetic, proves the immense value of returners given adequate opportunity. Her story should be widely shared as an inspiration to others who have struggled to return to work, as evidence that against the odds, it can be done.

Recognising Manjula as Returner of the Year suitably honours her inspirational achievement reviving her engineering career while juggling childcare duties.

Dr Zhanet Zaharieva is a co-founder of a University of Oxford spin-out commercialising the world’s leading quantum random number generator technology. As an entrepreneur, she has been instrumental in building the company from its inception with a laboratory prototype to a business with enterprise customers in the last four years. In her role as Chief Operations Officer, she has also optimised the company’s operations to successfully scale for growth. Such a task was accomplished while maintaining policies that drove for a safe, inclusive, and positive working environment.

As the COO, Zhanet designed and implemented systems in place to grow the company’s staff from five to over twenty people in less than two years. The challenges were amplified in that the quantum sector required unique roles involving niche technical competencies.

Zhanet continues to fulfil her mission of building inclusive teams, creating strategic commercial partnerships, and growing the brand awareness of Quantum Dice through her role in industry events. Ultimately, she hopes this work sets up the company’s pathway to grow as a truly global leader in the quantum technology space

Juggling work and studies, Vasiliki swiftly adapted to the new learning system and culture. In under two years, she received multiple internship offers, securing prestigious awards like the UKESF scholarship and being recognised as Scholar of the Year runner up, BrightSparks Award, and IET Future Talents Scholarship.

A few months ago,Vasiliki undertook a highly successful 14-month placement at EnSilica, an ASIC design company, where she actively engaged in a satellite communications chip project. Her responsibilities included directed block verification, focusing on enhancing existing test cases for the internal AMBA connectivity of the System-on-Chip.

Susmitha began working with a team of very young, bright & talented engineers at Kigen, who have a goal of developing a product that needs to be put on the market very quickly. Though this team is very strong in the technical aspects of the product, they needed guidance and a helping hand on operational aspects like attaining and maintaining GSMA certifications (a mandatory compliance) and process establishments for customer success while maintaining a high quality of delivery standards. That’s where Susmitha  experience from her previous roles came in handy.

Susmitha always delved deep into the features the team developed, and standing in customers' shoes, she looked for problems that may arise and developed documentation and processes that would help avoid these issues. Within 12 months, the product secured its first customer, and over the last few years, it became one of the primary revenue-generating product lines.

Tahereh brings creativity and precision to the table, making her a great asset in the dynamic landscape of digital design engineering. Her knowledge and experience spans RF and Digital domains making her insights extremely valuable in the innovative process and critical to the success of the Secure 5G. 

Tahereh’s willingness to experiment with her peers and the newest chip sets demonstrates her tenacity. On the Secure 5G project, Tahereh brought together multidisciplinary RF and Digital engineers and was able to deliver technological leaps forward against the backdrop of a fast paced, collaborative project.

Tahereh is dedicated to supporting women in electronics. This shines through in her mentorship of Eva, SED’s intern Design Engineer. Tahereh’s personal passion is the study of XILINX Digital Beamforming capabilities, and building her business acumen through Multiverse Business Transformation Fellowship by Goldman Sachs.

The judges acknowledged Priyanka's outstanding training and collaborative efforts, noting her mentorship of an innovative team in an evolving technology domain. Priyanka's dedication serves as a genuine source of inspiration for women engineers everywhere.

Annika came to Quantum Dice after graduating with a PhD in Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, while being one of the first engineers during the Covid pandemic to work on building ventilators at Oxvent.

Her ability to think independently, to not easily give in during an argument, and present solutions that are well thought through from beginning to end make her a great asset. Needless to say, Annika is strongly committed to diversity and inclusion as this is part of the Quantum Dice identity.

Given her strong impact on the company, Annika will continue to take more and more responsibility taking ownership of bigger projects. Annika truly is a one-of-a-kind talent! 

Prof. Sohini Kar-Narayan is a founding Director of ArtioSense Limited spinout company from Cambridge University and winner of the 2022 Armourers and Braisiers Venture Prize and the 2023 Institute of Physics Lee Lucas Business Award for early stage medical and healthcare companies.

ArtioSense seeks to commercialise a novel force sensing technology for precision orthopaedic surgery. This technology was developed in Prof. Kar-Narayan’s laboratory in the Department of Materials Science in Cambridge, where she is Professor of Device Materials. As head of a large multidisciplinary research group (https://www.kar-narayan.msm.cam.ac.uk/), she spearheads translational research by actively engaging with prominent surgeons and clinicians on projects where she bring her extensive materials and device engineering expertise to solve clinical problems. Prof. Kar-Narayan is internationally renowned for her pioneering research on functional materials and devices for energy and biomedical applications. Her research covers novel energy harvesting nanomaterials to microfluidic biosensors, to the additive manufacturing of next-generation flexible electronics. She was recognised as one of the top 50 Women in Engineering by the Women's Engineering Society in 2021, and was awarded the 2023 Royal Society of Chemistry Peter Day Award for her pioneering work on functional materials for energy and biomedical applications. She was elected Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals & Mining (IoM3) in 2022.

Nancy Castro, a Nutritional Scientist turned Electronics industry professional, has showcased outstanding achievements and success during her four-year tenure at Diodes. Beginning as a Sales Development Representative in 2019, Nancy’s strategic prowess and dedication propelled her to the position of Distribution Account Manager in 2022, responsible for managing a revenue portfolio exceeding $100 million.

Nancy is continuing to develop innovative ways to promote and sell products across Europe and to thoughtfully adapt her approach to align with the cultural demands of these individual countries.

Within the sales organisation, Nancy’s strategic vision and leadership contributed to the growth of Diodes’ market share in Europe, rising from 3.1% to 3.5%. Her impact extended beyond traditional sales metrics, encompassing initiatives that transformed Diodes Europe into a workplace dedicated to employee welfare too. 

These last eighteen months has been full of creative endeavors for Madhuparna. She moved into people management role after several years of technically leading digital IC campaigns in Cadence for a leading processor IP provider.

Her keenness in developing internship pipeline led to her being able to recruit two previous interns into permanent roles in her team while a third intern got recruited into another business unit.

Her passion for championing STEM initiatives led to her starting the SWE (Society of women engineers) Cambridgeshire affiliate which currently has 25+ members locally and 80+ members all over UK last September. She helped secure funding for Cadence members of the affiliate to attend WE Local 2023 conference in Barcelona in May where she was also a session host. She has been SWE Global Ambassador for FY23 and FY24 and encouraged employees to enroll for various SWE activities and webinars around emotional intelligence, authentic networking, generative AI etc.

The UKESF is striving to address the gender imbalance in the Electronics sector and their undergraduate Scholarship Scheme is making a real difference. Last year, 28% of scholarships were awarded to female students. This is a record number! Over 90% of graduated female scholars work for Electronics and Technology companies.

Dr Catherine Ramsdale is a pioneer of ultra-thin semiconductor circuitry on flexible substrates. Consistently at the cutting edge of technology, she is a co-creator of PlasticArm, the world’s first fully functional non-silicon Arm processor, as well as PlasticARMPit, the world’s first enose sensor system on flexible substrate.

Over the last 12 years, she has been instrumental to Pragmatic’s success. She has overseen the development of innovative approaches tackling the design and test challenges presented by ultra-thin metal-oxide semiconductors on flexible substrates. Quite simply, flexible semiconductors would not be where they are today without Catherine’s involvement – a fact underscored by her contribution to numerous related inventions and patents.

Vicky is a Chartered Engineer, and technical product management and product marketing professional with over 25 years’ experience in product management, product marketing, research, and development in the technology sector, primarily in cellular wireless devices and infrastructure from 2G to 5G.

Vicky has worked at Motorola, Alcatel-Lucent, NVIDIA as well as UK funded start-ups Picocom and Ultraleap. She joined Picocom over 5 years ago and lead Product Management, Technical Marketing and partnership activities. Her achievements whilst at Picocom include: Successful product definition of Picocom’s PC802 and PC805 silicon, platforms and software roadmap. Authored and managed product collateral including product briefs, product datasheets, product and roadmap presentations for customers and partners. Successfully managed stack and RF partners and the interoperability with Picocom products including Radisys, Capgemini, ADI and TI. I support the business development team with customer engagements including proposing product plans to meet their requirements and preparing RFI/REQ responses.

Sara's technical expertise and contributions to the field are reflected in her 6 patents and 41 publications on SPAD related topics. These patents and publications serve as a testament to her knowledge and experience in the field. In her role as a SPAD Pixel Architect, she has been instrumental in ensuring the success of our first high volume project with a major customer, which resulted in the Imaging subgroup achieving the significant milestone of shipping 1 billion units in 2019. She has also led the development of SPAD pixels in advanced technologies which underpin ST's Flightsense™ products. Furthermore, she has successfully driven the transformation of proof of concepts from academia to industry in the development of SPAD technology.

Dr. Valerie Lynch is a pioneer in the field of electronics, renowned for her trailblazing career marked by numerous groundbreaking achievements and significant contributions to technology innovation and gender diversity in the industry. She has been at the forefront of pioneering technologies, playing a pivotal role in milestones such as sending the first-ever text message, leading the development of initial electric charging technology, and contributing to the creation of the first blood glucose monitor. Dr. Lynch's dedication to mentorship has also seen her guide and inspire over 50 engineers, many of whom have gone on to lead teams and establish successful start-ups. Throughout her illustrious career, Dr. Lynch has consistently broken down both technological and social barriers, advocating for gender equality and empowering women in the electronics industry.