Girls in Tech
UKCWC has successfully hosted our third talk of UKCWC ‘Girls in Tech’ talk series, in collaboration with Fancience Education and Samsung STEM GIRLS, and joined by student representatives from the Samsung STEM Girls.
The Samsung STEM Girls is a program initiated by the China Women’s Development Foundation and Samsung China in 2018. The program focuses on improving students’ leadership and innovative capacities by utilizing international advanced courses and training in STEM, and hopes to cultivate women scientists who can lead with confidence and creativity.
STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Traditionally STEM has been very male orientated, in terms of careers and development. At UKCWC we realise that there has been great strides made in these fields to become more ethnically diverse and gender balanced.
We carried on this great work via this talk, where we welcomed four distinguished speakers who work in the technological field to discuss how girls can get into the technology careers.
Guest Speakers
Qun Yang
Qun is chairwoman of UKCWC and co-founder of Biorbyt Ltd. She organised the Chinese STEM girls tour to the UK with the support of Samsung and the China Women Development Foundation.
Yue Wang
Yue is a Senior Technology Manager in Samsung UK, and is currently leading Network AI Research for 5G and beyond within Samsung. She is the Samsung delegate of ETSI ISG ENI (Experiential Networked Intelligence), the Secretary and Rapporteur of ENI, and the recipient of the ISG ENI award in 2019.
Xiangyu Sheng
Xiangyu is a highly regarded and leading expert in the arena of Environmental Science and Climate change. She is currently a Director in Environmental Consulting sector, also holds leadership positions in several professional organisations.
Cheng Zhang
Cheng Zhang is a researcher at the Machine Intelligence and Perception group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. She has received the PhD from the Department of Robotics, Perception and Learning (RPL), School of Computer Science and Communication, KTH Royal Institute of Technology. She is currently working on Representation Learning and Approximate Inference.
Huabing Yin
Huabing is a postdoctoral researcher in University of Glasgow, developing microfluidics for high throughput cellular analysis. Her research focuses on developing technologies to understand how a cell, a fundamental unit of life, interacts with its surroundings at the micro-scale, and exploiting this knowledge to benefit health care and the environment.
Summary
The guests started by introducing their areas of expertise in technology and shared stories about how they got into these fields. They also discussed some of the top challenges women face in technology and ways to overcome those. Finally during the Q&A session, the audience raised many questions around career choices and planning, for example, how to pick technology fields and what is required to break into a technology career.
Check the full video below.