The “Rising to the Top in Industry” career panel touched upon topics including mentoring, setting career goals, filing patents, and management versus technical tracks.
At the 2020 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), the Women in Circuits (WiC) Committee hosted the first-ever Rising Stars workshop for graduate and undergraduate students as well as young professionals who have graduated within the last two years and are interested in learning how to excel in academic and industry careers in computer science and electrical engineering. Twenty individuals were selected to attend a special dinner featuring a keynote speech by Prof. Anantha P. Chandrakasan - already a risen star - and a mentoring session with committee members. The event also included two panels. The “Rising to the Top in Industry” career panel touched upon topics including mentoring, setting career goals, filing patents, and management versus technical tracks. The “Navigating the Assistant Professorship” panel addressed topics related to applying for a faculty position, tenure review, and managing day-to-day life in academia. The panels were open to all ISSCC 2020 attendees and the public and attracted more than 300 participants. This Fall 2020 issue of IEEE SolidState Circuits Magazine on WiC follows the tradition of previous issues since 2017, enabling more exposure to female leaders through exposition of their work in circuits on a variety of important topics. The following IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society members were asked to contribute tutorials for this issue:
- Jane Gu, associate professor at the University of California, Davis, and member of the Technical Program Committee (TPC) for the IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium, Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), and ISSCC, is an associate editor of IEEE Microwave and Wireless Components Letters and VLSI Journal of Integration and guest editor of IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC).
- Ulkuhan Guler, assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is a senior member of JSSC and serves on the CICC TPC.
- Alicia Klinefelter, senior research scientist in the ASIC and VLSI research group at NVIDIA, has served on the ISSCC TPC since 2018.
- Yan Li, vice president for memory design at Western Digital, leading the design of advanced 3D NAND as well as other nonvolatile memories and new innovation initiatives, serves on the ISSCC Machine Learning TPC.
- Rabia Yazicigil, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University and visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was vice-chair of the 2020 Rising Stars workshop.
- Maneesha Yellepeddi, manager of the Programmable Solutions Group at Intel, is an alumnus of the 2020 Rising Stars workshop.
ISSCC 2021 will continue this tradition by hosting another Sunday evening workshop bringing together experts in cloud-connected biosensors, advance algorithms, and artificial intelligence to discuss our preparedness for combating the spread of infectious diseases now and in the future. The “ICs in PandemICs” panel will feature recent work on remote patient monitoring and data analysis with related security and privacy concerns. I hope to see you all there!
